Columbine Made Simple
“I’ve been teaching my kids they mustn’t tolerate teasing. Now, how do I get them to stop crying every time they’re teased?”
The true meaning of the school massacres and what the country should be learning from them.
Section Seven
What changes occurred after the massacre at columbine school:
THE SOLUTION
by Izzy Kalman, MS
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Since Columbine, the country has been stepping up efforts to teach teasers to stop teasing. Programs to teach tolerance are proliferating. However, we are forgetting that these massacres have been happening precisely in a place and time in which the organized teaching of tolerance is unprecedented in the history of the world. The problem behind the massacres is not really that kids are not tolerating each others' differences. The real problem is that the teasing victims have not been able to tolerate the teasing, and went berserk! When we emphasize the message that "teasing is a bad thing that hurts people's feelings," we are doing children a disservice. It increases the likelihood that they will get upset when teased! This is exactly the wrong message they should be getting. We need to go back to teaching "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me."
We want our children to grow up being resilient. How can they be resilient when we treat them like glass, as though they can be broken by mere words. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebald were not resilient. They were brittle, and they shattered when they couldn't take the insults anymore -- insults they had been unwittingly inviting upon themselves by believing that insults hurt feelings. And this is the problem with all the student murderers: society impaired their natural sense of humor so that they couldn't take a joke about themselves. The solution is not to punish the rest of us by forcing us to live a humorless life. No one is going to be better off when we stifle our laughter. We aren't going to make the teasing victims healthier by making ourselves sicker. The sign of a healthy person is not that he demands that everyone treat him as though he is perfect and fights anyone who challenges that illusion. A healthy person knows that he is not perfect, and is able to laugh at himself and to tolerate others laughing at him. If you called me names, and I got mad, the problem is not that you called me names; the problem is that I got mad. To make the teasing victims healthy, we need to teach them to stop taking themselves so seriously --to laugh about life so they can enjoy living again.
It is not just the teasing victims who need to lighten up. Society as a whole can use some lightening up. We have gone so far in trying to legislate protection from abuse that we are losing the ability to laugh at ourselves and each other. The truth is that we would become absolutely miserable if we eradicated teasing from the world. We would be left with a humorless life, a life devoid of laughter, a heavy, serious life. Teasing is not a bad thing -- it is a wonderful thing. If we are smart enough not to let it upset us, it makes us feel great. Teasing is an art that needs to be developed, and it requires intelligence. The person who has mastered the ability to make fun of us cleverly, in a way that makes us laugh, is fun to be with and is greatly loved and appreciated. We are even willing to pay professional comedians for the pleasure of having them make fun of us. Our lives would be much happier if we spent more time learning how to tease and be teased in real life, and spent less time watching the pros do it on TV. But we should also learn an important lesson from the characters on TV comedies. They never go crazy with anger when they are shown to be ridiculous. Like the Pygmies, they simply take it in stride, and so should we.
Despite the widespread devastation caused by teasing, it is actually a simple problem to tackle. With an effective approach, the vast majority of teased children can be taught to stop getting mad when teased; this will make the teasing stop in almost no time, sparing them years of needless misery. Identifying the children who are teased is an even simpler task. All you need to do is ask. The kids who get picked on are more than glad to let you know about it. Moreover, the teachers and students all have a good idea who these unfortunate souls are, and so do most of their parents. The entire job of identifying and helping the teased children of America requires little more than some good knowledge; all the personnel that are needed are already on the school payroll. While this approach admittedly cannot guarantee that massacres will never occur again, neither can any other method! However, teaching a victim of teasing how to make the teasing stop in the early grades is the best way to guarantee that that child will never have reason to want to exterminate his schoolmates in the higher grades. Best of all, it will help all those millions of other children who suffer terribly, though they kill no one. All this, while being infinitely cheaper than turning the school system into a police state in order to apprehend two or three murderers before they strike.
