Posted on 06/03/2012 9:01:25 PM PDT by Nachum
NEW YORK CITY -- A 12-year-old boy harassed by school bullies about his intelligence, his height and his deceased father killed himself in the New York City apartment he shared with his mother, according to relatives and those who knew him, NBCNewYork.com reported.
"I want to remember him as a happy kid," his anguished sister told NBC 4 New York on Thursday.
Joel Morales, of East Harlem, moved to a different school after enduring incessant taunting for months, but the bullying persisted, the fifth-grader’s family said. Advertise | AdChoices
Kids chased Morales, threw sticks and pipes at him and teased him for his smarts and his 4-foot-9 stature, his family said.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.msnbc.msn.com ...
To make matters worse far worse, the parents play mind games with the kid. They tell him:
— “This is normal.”
— “These are the best days of your life.’
— “It's good for you. It will help you learn to deal with the real world.”
— “ We love you so much.” ( That is the cruelest mind game of all.)
Actions that an adult could take to court and win millions from their employer and have the perpetrator charged with a felony are **tolerated** by parents and our collectivist schools.
In the real world an adult can quit his job, move, and get police and court action. In the prison-like world of children they must learn prison survival skills, and form protection gangs ( cliques). Nearly all the social skills learned in school must be **unlearned** if the adult is to have any success in work, marriage, and the community. Thankfully, humans are resilient and most of us make the transition. Sadly, some do not.
To many, school is like falling down the rabbit hole and wandering around in Wonderland. For many it takes many years of adult living before they can climb back out of that rabbit hole and begin to see things clearly. Their parents **knew** school was hell hole, and they did nothing about it.
I call them “Practice Prisons” and do my students love it.
They see the same mentality that gets adults through incarceration and forced labor.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Excellent way to state it. “Practice prison”.
People I know are usually surprised to learn that I am a strong advocate for the ubiquitous zero tolerance policy when it comes to bullying.
It seems to me that the sooner children understand that authority figures simply cannot be trusted to reliably distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, the better.
Teachers, law enforcement, the justice system, superiors at work, etc., will rather willingly make no decision or an unjust decision than a sound decision.
Once bullied upon, if authority comes by, you’re both in trouble. So retaliate. Stand up and defend yourself. Nothing to lose. And the bullies learn a lesson: don’t mess with me.
There are wide varying degrees of bullying. Plus, some kids might have a lot of other terrible things going on in their life besides.
Out here in my small Massachusetts Mayberry town of 7k, my 13-yr-old’s best friend tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol, after being bullied at school and on Facebook. Another friend of my daughter had to be hospitalized in a psych ward for a month for the same reason.
I’m sure we’re the exception and not the rule.( /s)
God help the children, because no one else is.
My wife is beginning to fully appreciate homeschooling.
Was he harrassed because he couldn’t dribble a basketball? No crossover or between the legs action?
—— There is only one effective way to deal with bullies.——
Close down the penal colonies.
But kids need the social interaction, even the not-so pretty variety (to some degree) in order to better cope later on in life, in the workplace, etc.
——My feeling is that it is the parents who ultimately failed. Suicide means that the victim felt he had no recourse. None at all.-——
Please tell me you’re kidding.
Could the mother afford private school? If not, the boy was doomed to four more years of a living hell, institutionalized by force of law for having commited the crime of being born. At 12, four years is an eternity.
-——Those options are not available to children. They are told to go to a certain place and be tortured by sadists, day after day after day. Would you, an adult, agree to that? What would you call it when you are forced to go to a plantation school and not just work but also suffer there, with no recourse? What’s the difference between a child and a slave? Just the degree of how hard the labor is? Note that children are far more vicious than a group of adults. They may not understand it, but it doesn’t change the fact.-——
Preach it!
——But kids need the social interaction, even the not-so pretty variety (to some degree) in order to better cope later on in life, in the workplace, etc.-——
I have never been bullied or assaulted in the workplace, in church, while shopping, or in any other social setting. Have you? On a daily basis?
Or is this really an extremely thin justification of “free” babysitting?
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Acting “crazy” always worked for me. If someone started something, I’d simply talk lovingly about weapons/fire/explosives/chemicals and lick my lips while mumbling wide-eyed about ‘delicious’ body parts and hot blood. If someone kept at it, I’d figure out their class schedule and where they live so I could stalk them and mess with their heads.
I was an ‘A’ student and knew none of the teachers would believe the idiots. I looked like the epitome of geek but only one bully ever had the balls to actually put his hands on me. It was the last day of middle school so he sucker punched me. I started laughing maniacally about how much of a dead man he was, picked up some broken glass that I pretended to eat and offered him some. He left in a hurry.
I moved many times and it was always the same thing the first month at every new school. Just like in prison when all the meatheads see some “fresh meat”. With today’s camera phones and zero-tolerance nonsense, I would probably be expelled and/or chemically lobotomized if I was in school now…
Too bad there weren’t any monks around to help out. Those punks, whether they were Protestants or Green Martianists, didn’t have any love to lose. They knew nothing about respecting people that they disagree with. A gratuitous beat down is no way to sell a point of view unless one is stumping for Satan. Good grief, even Jesus Christ said there’s a time to take a sword. I guess the nuns couldn’t exactly ignore it, but did they or their priest have any other answer they were willing to give feet and have walk?
I hate bullying, yet it seems that the need for kids to get involved with real smash mouth bespeaks the lack of proper attention from the older generations. Taking the law unto yourself because nobody else will. This shouldn’t be something children should normally have to worry about. Yet it is.
I’m getting tired of the whole ‘social interaction’ canard.
The options - especially nowadays - for social interaction are legion for homeschoolers.
I know you have no love lost for pubskewl as a whole.
Certainly bullying is a place where even the better pubskewls fall down badly.
I think if push comes to shove, most dads would back their kid up in dusting off the bully. Not an ideal approach — the older generation of supposed leaders could stand to be more pro-active — but superior to being a doormat. I know my dad was furious when he learned I was getting bullied. He taught me the appropriate fisticuff moves (did you know a roll of pennies clasped in a fist serves much the same purpose as brass knuckles?), but he also went to that school in a rage and got in the face of the teachers. The bully kid, a scion of a school high muckety muck and a teacher, with the menacing activity happening in a coach’s class, caught it eight ways from Sunday. I never had to do the deed. I was lucky.
The mindless socialist regimentation of large modern public school classes has virtually nothing to do with what the grown child will see at most workplaces, at church, in business, etc.
Not unless you want them to approach these things like they would approach hell.
I read through all the responses, and I see a lot of well-intended advice, but sometimes it just doesn’t help.
We went through this with my 16 yo daughter. She was bullied, and at 5”4”, 110 lbs, and suffering from seizure disorder where a blow to the head can bring on seizures, fighting back was not really an option. She was physically assaulted twice, once in the classroom, where she did land a few punches, and we were told by the school that she would be arrested for assault herself for fighting back, so it would be better to just let it go. She had numerous bruises on her upper body from that.
The second time was in the school locker room, where she managed to escape but also after being hit. The school said that they handled it internally, and could not tell us what they did because of privacy laws.
My daughter was seeing a counselor, and we also had quite a few meetings with the school, and the school district’s person in charge of anti-bullying, so it was not like we as parents were unaware of what was going on, or not doing anything about it. Where we failed was believing their bullcrap. They sweet talk but do nothing.
On a Wednesday night after church my daughter tried to kill herself by hanging herself with a belt from the shower head. I had to bust open the door, and get her down. According to the ER doctor we were 30 seconds away from losing her. Thank God I heard her scream.
She spent 7 days in a mental hospital recovering, and is still in therapy and on anti-depressants. She is being home-schooled, and, thanks to God, she is doing a lot better.
We worked with the system and in the system, we had her in treatment, there was physical evidence of bullying, and harassment was reported numerous times. We did everything that could reasonably be expected of us in the system, and outside of it, and it still failed. They trumpet anti-bullying, they have the kids do Rachel’s Challenge and sign their names on a pledge, and it still doesn’t help. There simply is no serious consequences for bullying, and if you dare fight back, you are in as much trouble as the one who did the bullying.
We live just north of Dallas, in what is trumpeted as one of the best public school districts in Texas.
Can’t say that going to a UN declaration in looking how to treat children isn’t jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. It makes certain other normal things impossible such as religious teaching (I’m not speaking of extremism like violent Islamic jihads either). The American ideal sooner gives families the right to be wrong in teaching children about God than to foment a situation where God is utterly ignored by the young generation. Also since even the UN considers children incompetent up to a certain age, it’s not a matter of whether children WILL be drilled, but WHAT will they be drilled in. The UN answer isn’t always pretty, with its gay advocacy and whatnot.
Children used to be an avocation of parents, as much as their professional work might be. Now children seem to be afterthoughts.
What a hell that was.
Shout out to wintertime.
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