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 ...
Students: do NOT carry one of these.
Snopes says it might be bad for any perp you spray it on.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spray-for-pain/
You noticed that; too?
Awesome!!
Refreshing piece. I am SO SICK of these EVIL PEOPLE being treated like poor victims. As if.
Not to worry; for there are PLENTY of INsane girls out there that would eat this behavior UP!!
Oh; a bigger percentage than THAT vote Democrat.
This doesn’t read like it was written by a 17 yr old. Not the content, the writing style.
_____________
I thought the same.
Every conservative pundit or politician should have used the words PROMISE Program over and over. Instead most people have never heard of it. What an outrage to give federal tax dollars to school districts which decrease suspensions, expulsions and criminal referrals regardless of the number of infractions. Parklands County was a big “achiever” in this program. End result: Cruz has no criminal or mental health record and can buy a gun legally.
Not exactly what she said:
A year after I was assaulted by Mr. Cruz, I was assigned to tutor him through my school’s peer counseling program. Being a peer counselor was the first real responsibility I had ever had, my first glimpse of adulthood, and I took it very seriously.
Despite my discomfort, I sat down with him, alone. I was forced to endure his cursing me out and ogling my chest until the hourlong session ended.
That's more than most people would have done.
Plus, her account is colored by what happened since.
She may not have been as hostile to him at the time as you think.
Could be. Or some kids act up because they don't like the way you look at them or just the way you look. Is that a provocation?
True, we don't know the whole story, but it's not impossible for somebody we now know to be unbalanced to lash out without real provocation.
If you read the documentation on what goes through the heads of these whack-job shooters is that they generally have a long term problem that includes bullying and public humiliation.
It's not always a question of bulliers and bullied, victimizers and victims.
This guy might have been bullied, but I suspect he did enough bullying himself.
If this girl was a peer counselor to this kook, and she was frightened—she is a moron for staying in the same room as him.
She was about 13 at the time. How smart were you at that age? It's easy now to say what she should have done, but I wouldn't have known how to handle that situation at that age.
Plus, a lot of what she says now is influence by what happened this month. Her feelings and thoughts may not have been as clear and well-defined then as they are now.
So the kid was a bad seed. How is that a federal issue? Considering how many years the perp signaled his mental issues, how is it not a school issue, local governance issue, local administrative issue, local law enforcement issue?
Hillary once said, it takes a village. And then encouraged packing 3000 kids into a single campus. The village failed, but it’s still not a federal issue. The one consistency of the Parkland incident is the many students who think federal government and national law virtue signaling is the only solution to local community failures.
I'd have been in detention for sure. And possibly suspended. And if the problems continued it was off to reform school. That is if I survived the beating from the other guys in the school who would have pounded on me for hurting a girl.
Thankfully back in the old days the adults in the school took responsibility for dealing with kids with serious mental or behavior issues. Now it seems like the only person who actually was assigned to do anything with regards to Nikolas Cruz was a young girl.
>Or maybe he is a natural-born thug, so they opted to stay away from him. Human nature.
Either way, whatever animus he had and for whatever reason, they probably exacerbated it. All it takes sometimes is one kind person. I know that from the HS students I’ve had to deal with.
We TAXPAYERS have Tried to Befriend United Way and Planned Parenthood. But they Still Killed about 350 future Parkland students.
25% of ALL viable pregnancies end in ABORTION.
Thus 743 compared to the 2980 enrollment at Parkland.
Data says that PP performs more than HALF of all abortions in USA.
Cried.... after being hit in the back with a.... thrown apple? Yeah....
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