School Days: Bullying

My forthcoming YA novel, CRAZY BEAUTIFUL, is a contemporary re-visioning of Beauty & the Beast told in he-said/she-said fashion about a boy with hooks for hands and a gorgeous girl who meet on their first day at a new school. The book's central theme is not bullying, but a certain degree of it definitely happens in the book. If the kids at the school grant Aurora instant popularity based on her perfect physical appearance, Lucius is immediately forced into the role of crazy loner due to his imperfect physical appearance and because of the rumors contstantly swirling around him: that he was somehow responsible for the loss of his own hands. I'd tell you more specifics, but that would be spoiling the book. So I'll just say that if Lucius occasionally is very angry, it's not without reason.

As many of you know I have a nine-year-old daughter, the amazing Jackie. Recently our family has become obsessed with watching the series "One Tree Hill" on DVD. We're already in the middle of Season 4, and even though, as Jackie will occasionally say, "This show is so inappropriate for me," I can't stop watching, nor do I mind her watching a show with so many mature themes because I'd rather have to answer all the questions a well-written show raises in her mind than have her watch a poorly written, seemingly more age-appropriate show, that doesn't challenge her at all.

In the middle of Season 3, however, the challenge became almost too big. There was an incredibly dark episode where an unpopular boy decided to come to school with a gun one day. Without giving anything major away, I'll just say that by the end of the episode, two people were dead of gunshot wounds. As an adult accustomed to reading the headlines about the school shootings that have plagued the country in recent years, I could see what was coming a mile away; and, if anything, thought it wasn't as devastating to watch as it could have been, given how high the death count has been in such incidents in real life. But for Jackie? Believe me, the people who worry about sex in YA books or in TV and film put too much of their worries in one direction and not enough in the other: violence. And I'm not talking about the comic-book type violence of movies like "Iron Man." I'm talking about the realistic portrayal of some nebishy character one day coming to school with the intent to blow his classmates away. The thing is, I can discuss and explain any issues that come up about sex; and I'd just as soon my kid get answers to her questions as they organically arise while we watch a show together than from the kids in the neighborhood. But she was devastated by the school-shooting episode. And how could I explain that?

Parents and educators sometimes use the phrase "a teachable moment," a phrase I detest for its prissily superior sound. Unfortunately, I was out late shooting pool last night, so I'm too tired today to have my brain come up with a more-pleasing-to-me phrase than "a teachable moment," so that's the one I'm going to go with here. I realized that my daughter's devastation over the school-shooting episode presented a teachable moment.

That's when I began talking to her about the importance of kindness; how people who are born attractive - their own good looks a matter of luck, not merit - have a particular resposibility to be kind to those who are not so fortunate; how having been bullied and ignored is never an excuse for doing violence against others but it is certainly an all-too-common precipitating factor; how if you are always kind to the disenfranchised, one day your kindness may serve to save your own life, and even the lives of other people, and even if nothing so dramatic as that ever happens - and it is fervently hoped that it will not - you will at least have performed the human act of making someone else's like a little better.

We'll never solve all the world's problems, we'll never even completely solve the problem of bullying and its sometimes even more violent aftermath. But we can certainly take action to make things better. We can choose, instead of making fun of or ignoring the school "loser", to become empathetic, to wonder what it would really be like to be that other person, and becoming more empathetic, to simply reach out and say, "Hey, how's it going?"

Whoa, I'm long-winded today! Oh, and in case you're interested, I shot really well at pool last night. So...

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY: DO YOU WATCH "ONE TREE HILL"? GOT ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT BULLYING? ARE YOU GOING TO BUY MY BOOK WHEN IT COMES OUT???

Be well. Don't forget to write.

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