Another Example of Bullying

My local news picked up the story of Karen Klein, a 68 year-old bus monitor from Greece, New York who was being bullied by a group of middle school students. While certain groups are busy explaining how gay marriage will lead to the destruction of America, I think those groups need to take a step back and look at today’s youth. If you want to know who’s going to ruin our country then look no further. As adults, our number one priority should be raising the next generation to be good citizens. 

We need to stop making excuses for them. People love to point to youth as some sort of disclaimer. “They don’t know any better.” “Their brains aren’t fully developed.” “They can’t process the consequences of their actions.” If these arguments are true then why doesn’t crime magically stop once people are old enough to know better and their brains are fully developed and they are able to process the consequences of their actions? 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the death penalty or life in prison for teenage criminals. I think that unless the teen is a serial killer or sociopath or something equally dangerous to society, the focus should be placed on rehabilitation because (in my opinion) teenage criminals have the most hope in terms of turning their lives around. While most people are the same person they were in high school, there are lots of people who for better or worse, change over time.

The biggest difference I see between me and this new generation is that my parents taught me a simple thing called respect. I was raised to automatically respect people. Today we say people have to earn respect. Go somewhere with that mess. Everyone should be respected until they give you a reason not to. If the bullies in the video had respect for Karen Klein or for themselves or for their parents or for the school bus or the bus driver they would have behaved differently and they certainly would not have recorded their actions.

As for the punishment, I’ve always been a firm believer that the punishment should fit the crime. I think the students involved should have to make an anti-bullying video, volunteer at a nursing home for at least a month and meet with the friends and family of someone who has committed suicide. The sad thing is that after all that, I’m sure most of the kids would still be just as clueless as they are in the video.

I have posted the news piece below. Before anyone says that Karen Klein should have done something, I want to point out the obvious: she is an adult and they are children. If she had cursed them out, she would be fired. If she had smacked one of them, she would be fired. If she had made a disparaging comment about any of them or their families, she would be fired. The only option she had was to endure the taunts and maybe report it afterwards and try to get the offending students kicked off the bus, but even that would have met with a lot of drama.