Sticks and stones
posted in News, Parenting, Philosophy, Pop Culture |When I was growing up, there was a saying: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
Of course, kids still called names, and it still hurt, but having that said often enough sort of conditioned one to think that being called names was an ephemeral thing.
Then there was the "turn the other cheek" philosophy, in which, if you were hurt, rather than hitting back, you offered a further target. Sort of pre-Gandhi-ism.
So what’s changed? What makes a nice middle-class mom decide to fake an online personality to gain friendship with a depressive teen, then yank the "friendship" away, all as a way of "teaching a lesson" or some such thing to a girl who had "hurt" her daughter–resulting in the teen’s suicide? What makes fresh-faced cheerleader gals decide that a previous buddy’s namecalling on MySpace warrants a half-hour long smackdown to be posted on YouTube? What makes the mother of one of the beaters go onto national television and say–in all seriousness–"This is all blown out of proportion"?
Of course, these incidents have caused folks to come out of the woodwork to blame the Internet. It’s MySpace’s fault! It’s YouTube’s fault! My girl wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeeevul Internet wasn’t there! Or, I wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeevul Internet hadn’t made me do it.
Seriously. In these cases, the parents seem to have something missing. Us old-fashioned folk would call it "conscience", I guess. Or morals. Or a sense of proportion. Or something. What happened to saying something like, "If that girl is trash-talking you, surely you don’t want to associate with her?"?
Currently, the dotter is deep in the midst of the standard "If you don’t do x for me, I won’t be your friend anymore!" pronouncement phase. I give her the hairy eyeball at such statements to me, until she breaks down into a grin and giggles. She knows that saying those things doesn’t cut it with me. And I’ve had to intervene once or twice at after-school care when one or another of the girls says something like that as well.
The idea being that it’s not what someone else thinks of you that’s important: It’s what you think of yourself. It’s knowing you’ve done the right thing. It’s knowing when you’ve done the wrong thing. It’s realizing that some of these great dramas won’t mean a damned thing when you’re forty years old.
These internalizations don’t spontaneously emerge, of course. You have to work on them. And it’s not faux self-esteem B.S. that we’re talking about here–the "I am Special" entitled attitude. It’s the feeling that you’ve worked hard on something, tried your best, done the right thing, have stuff inside you that is worthwhile…
These girls–and their parents–seem to have missed the boat on all of this. The jockeying for prestige and station becomes the be-all and end-all of their existence. They’re judging their own worth by what other people say, in the heat of the moment, either to their friends or on MySpace. Now, I realize that names hurt. They sting. You can, indeed, end up crying in the middle of the night over what one of your acquaintances said behind your back. And it continues even when you’re forty-something.
But the thing to do is move on, concentrate on what’s good and going well in your life. Not beat the shit out of your former best friend so you can toss it up on YouTube and get lots of comments.
