The subject of childhood bullying has been much on my mind lately, what with my daughter’s middle-school play being cancelled because school administrators thought the language — which according to the kids realistically, even “sugar-coated”ly, reflects everyday language at the middle school — was “too mature” for a middle school, especially in the scenes depicting bullying.
Today I ran across a piece by Margaret Cho where she remembers incidents of bullying in her early teen years that were instigated by the parents of her friends. Ms. Cho says that the pain of these incidents “[hasn't] healed over time. The pain has just gone underground and now rises up whenever I don’t get a part I really want or a gig goes bad or I read something mean about myself in a magazine.” (I am afraid I understand that all too well.)
At the end, Ms. Cho says in essence that her suffering as a teenager has been transmuted into compassion for children everywhere:
I think that if you are an adult that all children are your responsibility - whether they are yours are not – whether you like them or not – whether you like their parents or not! Children belong to the world and we should be kind to them all, and care for them all, like they are all precious.
A goal to strive for.
Leave a Reply