Bullying in the United States schools has always been bad. However, what has been going on in the past 20 or 30 years in American schools with cliquishness and ostracism is actually creating a massive backlash that has resulted in shootings, hate crimes, and other horrific side-effects.
I, and my younger sister and brother, were all ostracized in our grade school, to the point where I attempted suicide in fourth grade. I was ridiculed because I was intelligent and got straight A's, and I was physically brutalized often. The teachers literally turned a blind eye, to the point where, in middle school, my parents enrolled me in karate classes and told me not to worry about getting suspended for fighting in school anymore, so long as it would get the kids to leave me alone. Between be decking a few kids in eighth grade and a few lawsuit threats to the school and against other parents, I managed to enter high school relatively left alone. My sister and brother were lucky enough to have parents who had already gotten used to the sort of abuse I had taken, and didn't sit idly by when they were bullied.
The case with Cho at Virginia Tech is a good example of what ostracism can do. An interview with one of his high school teachers reveals that he was rejected by his entire peer group because he was a foreigner. This ostracism had a profound psychological impact on him. Unfortunately, he never healed his wounds and months before his graduation, snapped and slaughtered many of his peers at Virginia Tech.
It is very reminiscent of Columbine, where the "Trenchcoat Mafia", a group of "dorks" that were ostracized by their peers, urned into a fanatical neo-nazi club and butchered their classmates, including innocents along with the tormenters.
What upsets me is that no one considers the damage bullying does to these kids. The media and politicians are constantly blaming "gun laws" and "video games". The truth is, the popular kids, the preppies, and the jocks are making many kids miserable for the most formative years of their lives. Every kid killed at Columbine was portrayed as a shining star, a beautiful life that had only performed deeds of glittering beauty and had a future as grand and bright as the sun itself. I have no choice but to consider my own experiences in school, and I think, "How many of those kids were rotten b-st-rds who had it coming?" But they never talk about that.
In America, bullying is beginning to be retaliated against. When I was in high school, I had grown tough enough and smart enough to bully back, and belittle those former tormenters who were less intelligent as me, instead of shooting them. I was an angry nerd in 1996-7 with a trenchcoat, cigarettes, dressed in black with a wallet chain, but I wasn't killing people, just telling them to f--k off. (Not that it was right of me to do, but, like I said, killing never crossed my mind). But more and more, people are growing so desperate that they are resorting to violence. They have nothing left to lose but their lives, which by this point, they percieve as worthless.
