The Word that Starts with B

A word that starts with B: buffet, bubbles, Badger, baffled, brandish, blue—No! Bullying. An agglomeration of teens value facebook and twitter and formspring as their canon while the important things in their lives face depreciation. Grades suffer. We are so contingent on the Internet that it becomes a necessity. Our generation believes that the Internet is an ingenious innovation. It is, but there is always a ‘but.’ There is a sinister side to the World Wide Web. People can manipulate you, destroy you, and ruin your reputation all from behind a computer screen. Once there was a demure girl, about our age. She had a titanic crush on a guy she met through MySpace. The “guy” in fact was an immature mother of a peer. This mother let her nepotism influence her behavior. You see she was upset due to recent events involving her insidious child and the girl. She played with the girl’s emotions, screwed with her head. This mother had the girl completely buying into her depraved duplicity. After the girl requested a date somewhere in a nearby mall the guy (aka the mother) dumped her; broke her heart and finished it off by decimating what little confidence she had. The obnoxious mother continuously assaulted her, pushing her over the edge. Coalitions of this abuse can lead to malign results. The girl about our age was found dead in her bathroom the next morning, a girl our age. It could have been you, or you, or even me. Just because it’s through a computer, doesn’t mean it’s clement. Words hurt. Across the gamut of excruciating experiences, cyber bullying ranks higher than most. The icing on the delectable cake is that these people are too spineless to say these hurtful things face to face. The mother stooped down to a level So cruel that she went out of her way to make an innocent, taciturn girl doleful, and even suicidal. Cyber bullying is as hurtful as verbal; the only difference is that the ones creating the hurt and the pain are hiding. Words hurt no matter where they come from. We are all just kids. Why do treat each other so dastardly? Have you ever been afraid of a hallway? Been surrounded by unfamiliar faces yet fearing the sight of one in particular. The one face that your nightmares are fraught with. Sadly, this is the despicable reality for a myriad of teens around the country. These teens arrive to school day after day with their states of mind far from intrepid. When they are pushed into the lockers, they’re frozen in fear unable to defend themselves. So they stand there and listen to the derogatory animadversions praying for the emancipation from the vicious blows that follow. A young boy, thirteen, from Pennsylvania, was brutally beaten, hung from a tree and just when he thought the beating had ceased, the bullies thought it would be funny to hang him from a metal fence and beat him again relentlessly. He writhed while the choleric tormentors pushed and hit him as he cried out. The only responses were his reverberations. The positive? His bullies were punished, but this was an anomaly. The majority of the time subversive bullies walk away with impunity, unscathed and apathetic. Bullies feel no need to show clemency to their victims because they know they will face only nominal repercussions. There is a dearth of authority in today’s schools. After the pandemonium, were all just kids and our only desideratum is to end the debacle. April 20th, 1999 – Littleton, Colorado: Columbine High School. 15 killed: 1 teacher, 14 students. 23 wounded. Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, had plotted for a year to Kill at least 500 and blow up their school. At the end of their hour-long rampage, they turned their guns on themselves. Columbine is known as the nation’s deadliest school shooting. If their peers had listened to them when they cried for help, if they had stopped the bullying, if they had listened to their warnings; then none of this would have happened. April 28th, 1999 – Taber, Alberta, Canada: 1 student killed, one wounded. At W.R. Meyers High School, the first fatal high school shooting in Canada in twenty years. The suspect a fourteen-year old boy had dropped out of school after he was severely ostracized by his classmates. December 1, 1997 — Michael Carneal, 14, liked to wear black and was thought by classmates in Paducah, Kentucky, to be a Satanist. That morning, he brought a gun to school and opened fire on a small prayer group. Three girls died and five other students were wounded. Another student tackled him, and it was soon revealed that Carneal had a pistol, two rifles, and two shotguns, along with 700 rounds of ammunition, all of it stolen. He'd threatened earlier to "shoot up" the school, but no one had taken him seriously. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can intervene. We just need to open our eyes and realize that bullying isn’t a joke. Please… if you see an act of bullying, Either do something about it or tell someone! Just that can change a life. THE word that starts with B.