Donations for bullied bus monitor soar past $500,000 (MSNBC.com)

It’s difficult to figure out just how to phrase what this story has compelled me to say without sounding like I’m trying to play down what Karen Klein went through, and continues to go through as the video of her being bullied on the school bus she was monitoring gets played over and over again, on news broadcasts and millions of computer screens all over the world. Let me say at the start, then, that what Ms. Klein had to go through should never have happened, and it is right to call attention to a problem like this. Elder abuse is one of those problems that we don’t hear about from the mainstream press and news nearly as much as we should, and it’s something I worry about more and more when it comes to my own mother, who’s only a couple of years younger than Karen Klein and not very strong due to complications from her diverticulitis.

Here’s what gets me about this situation, though: Why don’t we see this kind of attention, or these kinds of donations, when it’s a kid being bullied?

Video cameras have been installed in buses and classrooms across the country, and of course young people with cell phones often record goings-on in their schools as well. This isn’t even the first time that videos of kids bullying others have made national news, but when it was other kids getting beaten up there wasn’t this national hue and cry, and the younger survivors of this bullying certainly didn’t get half a million dollars of donations from concerned outsiders. Beating up an older person isn’t more acceptable than beating up a younger person, but why are the reactions in these cases so substantially different? Why was there no outpouring of attention and money at Mentor High School here in Ohio when the first student there committed suicide as a result of bullying in 2006? Why did it take three more suicides before it became a national news story, and even then why was there not a call by others to provide money or other resources so students there could get the help they so clearly and desperately needed?

All my life there has seemed to be a very strong line of thinking, deeply tied to modern conservative political thinking in America (but certainly not exclusive to it), that children being bullied in school, at least to a certain degree, is somehow good for them, that it “builds character” and “makes grown-ups (or men) out of them.” There’s an underlying presumption here that the world is a cruel, cold place, and no matter what happens you’re going to get “beaten up” metaphorically or literally (or both), by the world around you, so it’s actually good and healthy to “take your lumps” as a kid because it gets you used to being a grown-up. Even in my teaching career I witness this philosophy in teachers’ lounges, where sometimes it’s seemed to me like instructors are in a competition to see who can treat their students with the most cruelty. The world is a cruel place, they say, so it’s their job as teachers to treat their students with total disrespect and contempt because that’s what they should come to expect in “the real world.” (It’s usually the laziest teachers, the ones who don’t want to be bothered to come up with their own lesson plans or answer student questions or be of any substantial assistance to their students, who proffer this kind of thinking.)

Even if we accept the premise that “the real world” (for lack of a more commonplace term) is a cruel place, however, that does not mean that it has to be a cruel place. Just because a large number of people do nasty things to one another and get away with it (or even get rewarded for doing it) doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to change people’s minds and hearts (not everyone’s, of course, but most) to recognize bullying for what it is, in all its myriad forms, and to reject it and denounce those who continue to use it for their own gain. It is a difficult task, but it is not impossible. It won’t happen, though, unless people try.

That really gets at the heart of the catastrophic effects of bad teaching and bad parenting, and the people, corporations, and politicians behind it. If you don’t teach that something is possible to change, then you’re effectively reinforcing in students’ minds the idea that something can’t change. Education is supposed to be about expanding minds and helping others to critically evaluate the world around them and act when they need to act in the interests of themselves or others. It should be no surprise that the corporations and politicians who slam their thumbs down on the scales of education, who try with all their might to influence what gets taught in our schools and how it gets taught (reinforcing top-down hierarchies of power versus more egalitarian classrooms), are the ones who stand to benefit most from the idea that life is cruel and you’re always going to have to take your lumps, so you might as well get used to it at a young age and just accept that bruise or that bloody nose, or even that friend’s suicide.

This is one of the reasons, as much as I love teaching, it’s so hard for me to do, because despite all the training that I and other teachers have had in teaching, learning how best to reach minds of all ages and teach concepts and all of that, government officials and the corporations behind them put themselves into positions where they are the ones who control what gets taught in our schools and how it gets taught. Too often this results in curricula that serve as little more than job training, teachers like myself being reduced to little more than talking heads parroting what is essentially a company line, and generations of young people who never try to make the world a better place because they’re brought up in an educational environment that reinforces this notion that the world is cruel and you’re going to get beaten up no matter what you do. For those with power, for those with the most capability to engage in this kind of figurative and literal bullying (and the most experience practicing it as well), whether it’s cutting social welfare programmes for the poor to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, or trying to restrict the personal lives of people whose sexuality and sex lives you don’t agree with, the allure of essentially indoctrinating young people into this kind of thinking goes without saying.

This is where My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comes in. After nudging from several of my friends I finally watched the show, and it’s hooked me in a way that I don’t think any American television show ever has. I hesitate to refer to myself a “brony” or a “pegasister” because those terms are used by some in a pejorative way to refer to the unhealthily obsessed fans of the show, but on top of enjoying the animation style and storylines, the show presents a worldview, as John de Lancie (the voice of Discord on the show, but most famous as Q on the second-generation Star Trek television shows) has pointed out, fits in with the utopian view that Gene Roddenberry tried to infuse into the Star Trek franchise, this idea that things can get better if we all act kindly and respectfully towards one another, and like Star Trek before it, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is inspiring its followers to create a tremendous wealth of fan art and fanfiction. (Not all of it is great, yes, but a surprising amount of it is.) Is it any surprise that the politicians and corporations trying to take over education are the ones who are responsible for the deep cuts in arts programmes in schools in my lifetime?

The show has garnered a very large fanbase, cutting across age and gender lines in a way that I can’t remember any other show doing before, and a large part of that is probably because of a deep need so many of us have for a world like the world of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, even if it’s fictional, a belief that somewhere there is a place where kindness and compassion will always win out over hate and bullying.

The conservative reaction to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was almost laughable in its predictability. Fox News Channel was absurd, not only with its hosts coming down harshly on the show while admitting they never bothered to watch a single second of it, but trying to parrot the old line about how cartoons are for kids. Never mind that we’re now nearly twenty years into the anime/manga boom here in the United States, never mind that there have been cartoons that have cut deeply across age lines and have included material specifically for older viewers while still being focused on children (Animaniacs and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle come to mind), because the conservative power structure says cartoons are for kids, anyone over the target age group who watches My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (or any other cartoon for that matter) needs to, in Fox News’s words, “grow up,” by which they mean give up the show’s ideas and accept a more pessimistic outlook on life and the shows (and politicians) who push that outlook.

I certainly hope that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic continues to bloom and become a bigger and bigger phenomenon, and I readily admit to trying to convert my friends and family into becoming fans of the show. However, it’s my hope that in addition to all this wonderful art and community that the show has inspired, that it also inspires people to take the lessons of the show and to put them forth into real life, and to work for a world that’s a little more like the world of the show. It’s good to have the show and its community as a refuge, and there are already tales of young people, survivors of bullying and other hardships, who have stepped away from planned suicides and self-abuse because of the show. That, in and of itself, should be enough reason to place the show on as high of a pedestal as we can construct for it. Like everything, though, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic isn’t for everyone, and so we also need to work to create a “real world” that’s more like the one in the show, where compassion triumphs over cruelty, and whenever anyone is bullied, regardless of age or sexuality or any reason at all, we come forward like some have come forward for Karen Klein, and we say, as loud as we can, “This is unacceptable.”

This is not an easy task, especially because there are all these loud voices calling both My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and even the notions of compassion and tolerance “childish” and “immature” and even “un-American.” Pushing the show can, and I think should, be part of an action plan to make the world a better place, but we also need to do harder things like standing up for the disempowered when so many voices are ready to shout you down, not turning a blind eye to bullying and other injustices, and doing what you can about them, protesting in words and votes and other actions, so that instead of making promises to troubled young people that things will get better if they can just endure the problems that are leading so many of them to kill themselves, we address the problems as best we can. Saying “it gets better” isn’t enough for too many young people, it needs to be better for them, and it needs to be better now. The effects of bullying affect us all, and youth suicides are just one of the grimmer statistics that give evidence to that fact. How many more suicides, how many more videos of people getting beaten up, will it take to move people into real, sustained action?