Posted on 03/28/2018 10:34:45 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
PARKLAND, Fla. — My first interaction with Nikolas Cruz happened when I was in seventh grade. I was eating lunch with my friends, most likely discussing One Direction or Ed Sheeran, when I felt a sudden pain in my lower back. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of my 90-pound body; tears stung my eyes. I turned around and saw him, smirking. I had never seen this boy before, but I would never forget his face. His eyes were lit up with a sick, twisted joy as he watched me cry.
The apple that he had thrown at my back rolled slowly along the tiled floor. A cafeteria aide rushed over to ask me if I was O.K. I don’t remember if Mr. Cruz was confronted over his actions, but in my 12-year-old naïveté, I trusted that the adults around me would take care of the situation.
Five years later, hiding in a dark closet inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I would discover just how wrong I was.
I am not writing this piece to malign Nikolas Cruz any more than he already has been. I have faith that history will condemn him for his crimes. I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: Maybe if Mr. Cruz’s classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Douglas would never have occurred.
This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates. The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The fake story from yesterday?
Other students avoided him because he was unstable.
But the idea that he was seriously bullied hasn't been proven yet.
BS. She sat down and talked to somebody who everybody else understandably avoided. That was better than nothing, and better than most people that age (or any age) would do.
"Befriend" can mean different things to different people, but reaching out to somebody who is scary and unstable and trying to be sympathetic, even if it was in a semi-official capacity, is something that certainly shouldn't be dismissed or disparaged.
Why did he kill them?
(crickets, crickets)
> “Befriend” can mean different things to different people
I have never heard that word used to mean “sat down with someone for an hour because I was assigned to do so, while resenting him the entire time”.
Bullying may be a factor in some of these incidents, but I was bullied in middle school and high school. I didn’t kill anybody, although I’m affected to this day by it. Don’t plan to kill anybody over it, either.
I know of other people who were bullied. The didn’t kill anybody, either.
Or maybe he is a natural-born thug, so they opted to stay away from him. Human nature.
I thought it was well written. And she’s right, her school and other adults involved (or those who should have been involved)failed her and the other students at the school.
I’m guessing she actually tutored him on multiple occasions. And no sane girl would want to be friends, let alone lovers, with somebody who ogled her breasts, cussed at her and engaged in random violence.
I disagree. She was uncomfortable, afraid, and probably wished she was anywhere but there. But she did the job the school gave her to do as best she could. That's not being a moron, that's being brave.
The morons were the adults that pawned off a disturbed, mentally ill student on a fellow student instead of dealing with him themselves.
Source?
Let’s see. There are some two hundred million adults. The expectation is that at least one in one hundred is a maniac. That makes two million people. The miracle is that we don’t have more bloodbaths.
> I’m guessing she actually tutored him on multiple occasions.
Read the article. One occasion, total.
> And no sane girl would want to be friends, let alone lovers, with somebody who ogled her breasts, cussed at her and engaged in random violence.
Which makes her claim to have attempted to “befriend” him even more ridiculous.
I'd venture to say that over 1% of the population has severe mental illness.
“This is the girl who should have been the Parkland spokesman, not those two twits who are out there grabbing any bit of limelight that the DNC can arrange for them.
She has common sense, she expresses herself coherently and very effectively, and she says exactly what Trump was saying: we need maniac control. And a lot of “maniacs” start to show it when they are very young.”
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I agree 100% with your post. This girl produced a well written, common sense article — I’m just surprised that the NYT published it. To me, she painted a picture of a “bad seed” to whose nature she was exposed involuntarily and personally. I’d have zero problem seeing Cruz receive a quickly carried out death sentence,
I understand what you are saying. If it were my daughter I would tell her that peer counseling in high school is a bs resume checkbox. It’s not worth risking more physical harm to look good for a college recruiter.
But again, if you had thrown an apple at a table with the velocity that this kid describes...would you have been in that school long?
I sometimes had trouble similar to this when I was in grammar school. My Dad taught me to box and he taught me another valuable lesson- don’t get mad, get even. More then once I laid in wait for one of my tormentors, either in the hallway near a staircase or somewhere in my neighborhood. One kid I pushed down a flight of stairs. Another I whacked in the back of the heard with a stick. Word soon got around my school not to screw around with me.
***Your school administration and local Sheriff refused to do anything about Mr. Cruz.***
I remember a principal of a school who had also been a gym teacher. He said he never stopped such fights or bullying because it was just kids sorting out “the pecking order”.
Good name for it. Ever seen chickens kill anther chicken low on their social order totem pole? I have. they all peck at the back of the neck till they bring blood. In a day or two the chicken is dead.
Same for dogs, baboons, and other animals. There is a reason animals rejected from the social order is referred to as a “rogue”.
Perhaps; just perhaps; we taxpayers should shout NO MORE!!! and STOP subsidizing this stuff!
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