Greetings faithful readers! Please accept my apologies for my recent lack of posts and I very humbly beg your forgiveness. A family tragedy in the middle of spring break has left me with very little inspiration and even less motivation.
As I’m trying to and get back into the swing of real life, I’m also trying to regain my writer’s voice, that delightfully snarky commentary that has become my trademark. Here’s a proverbial shot of throat spray in the hopes that I can get things up and running again.
A few things that have been on my mind as of late…
Sarah Palin and CSU Stanislaus: What a horrible mess this is. And it just seems to be getting worse every day. I don’t know what I find more disturbing about this whole situation. Palin’s rock star demands are certainly ludicrous enough. While it is not quite as outrageous as Barbra Streisand requiring rose petals in her toilet bowl or Motley Crue asking that their dressing room be stocked with with a 12-foot boa constrictor and a submachine gun, Palin’s requirement of multiple hotel rooms and bendy straws is starting to border on diva-ish.
It’s no secret that I’m hardly the president of the Sarah Palin fan club, but why any college in the the CSU system would be spending money on any speaker is entirely beyond me (especially someone like Palin, who commands upwards of $100,000 per speaking engagement). Classes are being cut, professors laid off, fees raised again and again and CSU Stanislaus thinks it’s OK to pay what will no doubt be a ridiculous sum for a speaker at an anniversary celebration. For shame, Stanislaus. And even more shame that you went to such devious and underhanded lengths to conceal and dispose of the evidence. Shredded documents fished out of a dumpster? What’s next? Erased tapes, slush funds? This is getting completely out of hand.
If all the recent hullabaloo over the Carinalli loans at SSU isn’t enough to make a case for more transparency in university auxiliary organizations, then this certainly should be. Help me, Senator Leland Yee. You’re my only hope.
School bullying: It’s been in and out of the news for a while, since Columbine at least. But with the recent developments surrounding the suicide of Massachusetts high school student, Phoebe Prince, the issue has once again been pushed into the foreground.
I wonder, when Judy Blume penned the iconic young adult novel “Blubber”, if she suspected the frightening depths to which school bullying would sink and the very tragic results it would have on those being bullied.
I admit this is a somewhat personal issue for me, having been subjected to a bit of bullying in elementary school. Perhaps my mismatched clothes, good grades and band geek status made me an easy target, I’ll never know. But having gone through it in the days before cyber-bullying became the norm, I think I got off lucky. I never had a Facebook page devoted solely to how much people didn’t like me. Nor did I ever get my inbox spammed with hate mail and threats.
Nevertheless, I feel for Phoebe Prince. I see her cherubic face smiling out from the cover of People Magazine and I ache for her. It really isn’t much of a stretch to go from misunderstood and picked on to seeing absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel and having only one option left.
Over the years, school bullying has been downplayed, even glorified. Films like “Heathers” and television shows like “The Simpsons” have earned bullying a place of honor in pop culture, but at its core, bullying remains a very serious problem often with devastating consequences. I know it’s supposed to be funny, but every time I see one of the kids on “Glee” take a Slushie to the face, I can’t help but cringe.
Kids can be cruel and, unfortunate as that is, perhaps there’s just no way around it. But someone needs to advocate on behalf of the ones who are bullied and tormented. If not their parents (who can be hopelessly in denial), then the teachers and administrators, who surely must see it in their day-to-day activities. Someone needs to speak out and go to greater lengths to both prevent this behavior and to punish it when it does occur. We can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to school bullying and chalk it up to youthful boisterousness. Perhaps if schools took a more proactive stance on bullying and if parents were more in touch with their children and served as better role models, the persecuted and alienated kids in today’s schools won’t feel the need to resort to such extreme measures, and perhaps they may see a light at the end of the tunnel after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment