L’Observateur / May 22, 1999

DEAR EDITOR: So much emphasis is put on being good in sports and how one dresses, speaks or acts today, to be peer-correct in how one thinks, acts, walks and talks, until it is almost packish.

If you are not real athletic and don’t walk the walk of the main pack in school, then you are a nerd or “different,” a crime and sin punishable by daily, non-stop doses of harassment, torment and emotional and physical abuse by one’s fellow students and peers, pushed around, threatened, ridiculed, and it’s never say die.

It’s carried out into your neighborhood, out in the stores, theaters, malls – just everywhere the packers may be or spot and find you. An odd name, anaccent different from others. It does not take much to be the odd man outin school in today’s world. Even making too good grades can be a reasonthese days for being harrassed to death or tormented by one’s peers in school.

Yet, the general public still wonders why some students are driven to the point of insanity. These atrocities some packers commit upon these nerds,odd-man-outs, the different going to school with them. Forced by law tobe there, is it safer to go or not? It’s just as horrible, hard to take and to understand by those being tormented and who are on the receiving end of packers’ abuses.

Are the shooting deaths and bombings by those who finally are pushed too far, who go off the deep end to the point where they plot and plan and eventually carry out their ultimate revenge? Are those abuses being allowed to go on unchecked upon the nerds, student upon student, any different than the actions of the wife in the movie, “The Burning Bed”? In that movie, a wife is so tortured and abused until she actually set her spouse on fire to stop the daily doses of emotional and physical pain inflicted upon her.

It is not so different as some would like to think, believe or imagine. Is itthe schools’ fault, the parents’ fault, the movies, the videos, the video games or anything other, than one person preying upon another by some claimed innate right to torment the different? Or is it the “in-crowd” thing to do? As we watch the reports on the war in Kosovo with its ethnic cleansing, it is ironic we have a war going on in our schools across the country where the nerds, the odd men out, the different, are “cleansed” from any peace in their lives from social activities. Dubbed unfit as packers, they are leftout, put out and then tormented, harassed and abused, just like the Albanians.

The elite, the “better,” the jocks who look down upon them are not all so very different from Milosevic. Yet, how many of the ones who arecommitting the abuses that bring fellow students to the point of insanity and revenge, see part of themselves in this? Not many! Some teachers and principals ignore it and allow it within the walls of and on the grounds of their schools, these pack-type abuses upon students, singled out as different or a nerd by their peers.

Some parents encourage their athletically-fit, jock-tyle sons and daughters to be bullies and prey upon the weak, the lame, the slow, the odd, the poor, the different, never having taught their children self- discipline or respect for other’s lives.

Not all jocks or the stronger, faster, more fashion-conscious, or fit-ins are abusive to their fellow students, but the numbers are rising. And, asthey do, so do the possibilities of more nerds being pushed off the edge to revolt and seek revenge.

Yet the question remains – Are those who get their jollies and joys in abusing, blackballing, beating up, tormenting, or harassing their fellow students by right of their prowess and group of friends sane? Are they inflicting their non-stop emotional and physical pain upon others doing it just for the fun of it? If they are, then Milosevic is just an OK guy! And students wiping out other students because they get pushed over the edge and can’t take anymore of that treatment are just par for the course and are just as acceptable.

God knows I do not condone or believe that they are acceptable. But neithershould the abuses that go on and drive these children to act out upon such extreme measures to make the abuse stop in their lives.

Who can stop it? It begins in the home, carries on into the schools and spreads to society around all of us. Recognizing the problem is thebeginning of the cure and solution. Ignoring what goes on and goes downwon’t solve a thing. Each has to do his or her part.Hitler thought he was a really cool dude – invincibile, untouchable, indestructible. Yet was he? No! He was an insane, sadistic mass murdererwho wound up killed by those he sought to control. Food for thought!

Lillian Ridlen LaPlace

Copyright © 1998, Wick Communications, Inc.

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