What compels almost every group of humans who spend any amount of time together to break into smaller groups based on any number of societal reasons? We have the geeks and jocks, the pretty and not so pretty, the brains and the dummies, the sexually different, and just about anything else you can think of.  One of the worst outcomes of group dynamics is bullying. Whether it’s verbal, physical, emotional, or cyber it continues regardless of the steps taken by our society to stop it. The end results of bullying are ugly and include awful things such as suicides, murders, beatings, and a life long emotional issue for the victims to deal with. Nothing good comes of it.

I’ve experienced most of these things first hand growing up. They started for me in Middle school when I was a short and skinny nerd being bullied by a much older and meaner student and his pals. I dealt with it as best I could until a few years later when I grew about a foot and put on forty pounds. Then all of a sudden their nonsense stopped and they moved on to other smaller and less hostile targets.

In High School I had the misfortune to be socially placed into two different groups.  On one hand I was a jock who lettered in a number of sports but I was also confined to the weirdo category because of my artistic bent. At sporting events it was OK to be seen with me but all of my jock buddies avoided any type of friendship off the field. I was independent enough to deal with it but how well I did is still up for discussion.  If I handled it so well why am I continuing to talk about it after all these years? A good question to be sure but one I really don’t want to answer.  I suspect the scars on any bullying victim never go away completely.

I’m only bringing it up now because of what I observed only a day or so ago. I was riding by a local high school  and classes were letting out. I observed no less than five or six distinct groups standing on the same sidewalk.  They were talking amongst themselves in their own groups but ignoring the others.  I could see the obvious differences immediately, sport related jackets in one group, weird clothing and hats in another, musical instruments in a third and as always a small group of sad looking kids who were the obvious outcast group.  I was immediately transported back to my early days when I was the guy who walked through the many and varied groups wondering why I wasn’t being accepted. It was a little bit of time travel I could have done without.

I have no answers or solutions and apparently no one else does either. I see on TV the reports of student groups standing up and fighting against bullying. They wear their cute t-shirts and attend their cute meetings and accomplish very little.  The people that need to be attending those rallies and listening to the speech’s are the bullies themselves and the school administrators who have the power to discipline them.  The bullies watch those activities and laugh them off with a shrug and a smirk. Then it’s business as usual the very next day.  It takes much sterner consequences by the powers-that-be on the bully’s before we can expect to see any improvement.  Our politically correct school systems make that damn near impossible. Drastic problems require drastic action and doing nothing at all is cowardly and unforgiveable.