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Little Billy had a bad day at school today. The cherry on top was in his last class of the day (PE) when some kid called him a “stupid f–k”. Not “poop face” or “doo-doo head” as you would expect from a 7 year old, but “stupid f–k”.
You know, people are baffled by school shootings, they like to point fingers and blame guns and video games, but after 12 years of rubbing shoulders with the bottom of the barrel of humanity, years of taunts, teasing and bullying – school shootings seem an almost inevitable outcome.
We tell ourselves we’re preparing them for adulthood and teaching them how to deal with people, but if your co-worker calls you a “stupid f–k”, you go to HR. If a co-worker beats you up in the parking lot, they get arrested and have a restraining order placed on them, but we ask our kids to go back to class and face the people that victimized them, day after day – to sit across the room from an abuser – for possibly years – and people still act surprised when they look at the headlines.
There are plenty of places where kids gather that someone could hurt them. Kids are fish in a barrel on a school bus. Someone could find kids to hurt at a soccer game or a skate park.
But when school shootings happen, the person isn’t attacking kids, they’re attacking the school. They’re attacking the institution.
Fortunately, Little Billy is a sweetheart and he wouldn’t hurt a fly and I love that about him. I don’t see a need to “toughen him up”, because I know his classmates are going to do that. One “stupid f–k” at a time.
Ten years from now, ten years of “stupid f–ks”, I have no idea what kind of kid he will be. It makes me wonder about all of the school shooters out there… They were all someone’s sweet, little kid at some point. But, one too many bad days at school, one too many interactions with someone else’s shitty kid, one too many callous remarks from uncaring teachers changed all that.
Frankly, I’m surprised there aren’t more.
