This is a question I’d thought about a lot prior to the situation with Richie Incognito – an idiotic football player who has been kicked off of the Miami Dolphins for bullying a player who appears to be a more sensible person, and perhaps as a result, a slightly less effective NFL linebacker.
I think that the media’s obsession with bullying is mostly a product of the infantile culture we’ve created. Not that it shouldn’t be properly dealt with in schools, because it can really ruin a kid’s life – but is it really the biggest problem we have as a country? Does it have an impact on the lives of adults who haven’t been to a public school in ten, twenty, fifty years? Of course not. Its just a manufactured issue that people can discuss and easily agree on, as the drones fly and our currency tanks.
Bullying in some form is always going to exist. Humans are competitive and often nasty individuals who are made up of DNA – and DNA is survival, that’s all it is. People are threatened by others for various reasons, and they often act on it. Furthermore, it is scientifically proven that people have a given nature to act in a mob mentality fashion – which stems from wanting to protect a stash of crops or water.
Even if bullying in the true sense is legislated away – and it would definitely be a good thing if our public schools could figure out a way to stop assaults on children (could be a funding problem) – there will still be intimidation, insults, and domination. It will just take on a different form, but trust me, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and you cannot legislate against human nature.
That being said, if it is indeed a huge problem in our schools, it should be dealt with, HOWEVER:
These are NFL players. Both of the guys directly involved in this incident are over 300 pound, obese, steroid-ridden savages, playing a game designed to damage their brains, albeit for good compensation.
You need to handle that yourself.
I have sympathy for the fat kid who gets picked on.
The 350 pound man? Almost none.
In other news:
Osama bin Laden has posthumously been charged with bullying several thousand suicide bombers in an Afghan court.
Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger is attending a conference on bullying this week in Zurich. It appears that his Terminator character was in fact bullying the androgynous police alien in the film The Terminator – and Arnold, along with the rest of the cast and production crew, are being said to promote bullying culture.
Please give me a break. These are professional athletes.
Just to be clear, Richie Incognito is a human piece of garbage, although according to his teammates he seemed to fit in pretty well in the league.