So What?

Deadly revenge for bullied kids an absurd idea:

This is a great editorial from the Miami Herald by a man named Leonard Pitts Jr., who writes what I’ve been saying for years, bullying is no excuse to shoot up a school…

We have become sadly experienced with school massacres in recent years. We have seen many disaffected loners turn campuses into killing grounds. And then comes the inevitable explanation.

He was an outcast.

He was jilted by a girl.

The other kids bullied him.

And I repeat: So what?

And just like myself, Mr. Pitts has also been accused of not knowing what it’s like to be bullied…

My wife, who I’ve known since fifth grade, once had to run and get my folks after some boys jacked me up and tried to inject me with hypodermic needles they’d found in the trash behind a medical clinic.

Now that’s hardcore. How many of these Harris and Klebold wannabes have been harassed to the level of their tormentors wanting to inject them with medical waste? I can almost guarantee you not one of them. Did Mr. Pitts plan to shoot up a school? Not according to his article…

So yeah, I know a little something about being bullied. And yeah, too, I know something about wanting to mash the face of some jerk who’d made my days miserable.

There is, however, a gulf of difference between wanting to do that and wanting to indiscriminately massacre a schoolyard full of people.

It takes a special kind of arrogance, self-absorption and entitlement to believe that your humiliation and pain merit the lives of a dozen strangers.

Mr. Pitts also disagrees with the criminal as victim mentality and sums things up with an obvious question…

So to say a child killed people because he was bullied or ostracized is to dignify the act with false rationality — and to shift the onus for the crime to its victims.

I get impatient with hearing that because it explains everything and explains nothing, because it does not help me understand how a child can become so alienated from his own humanity and finally, because it does not address, much less answer, a question that ought to be painfully obvious.

Kids have been bullied and ostracized from the beginning of time. Why is it they are just now picking up guns?

Why indeed, Mr. Pitts. Why indeed.

I’m not doing the piece justice at all. So click on the link at the top.

I’m not familiar with the rest of Mr. Pitts’ work, but after reading this I think he deserves a Pulitzer.