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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (11439)	4/15/2001 8:36:34 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 82486

We were discussing bullying not long ago; I thought of you and X when I wrote down this story of a recent incident at the school my children attend. I'm curious to see what comment you have... I just had my first experience with bullying (as a parent; I had quite enough as a kid); it was not at all what I expected. I wonder if anyone else here has seen anything similar. I live overseas; my kids attend a small international school with kids from two dozen countries. There are only 200 students in the whole school, and no class has more than 20. Parents are very much concerned and involved, and though there is considerable discussion of bullying and how to prevent it, we have seen very little bullying. We have now discovered that in my son's 5th grade class, it's been going on for quite some time. We haven't seen it because it was not what we were looking for, and it was not where we were looking for it. We were looking at the boys, and expecting physical bullying. What we've found is that a group of girls has selected one girl in the class for total ostracism, imposing written "hate contracts" on girls outside the group, by which the girls agree to hate the selected target on pain of being ostracized themselves. It has been very effective; none of the girls dared to cross the line, and the exclusion of the target has been total, except in the classroom, where the hate group agreed (stated in the contract) to relax the rules only enough to conceal the ostracism from the teacher. Because the school is a neighborhood school and there is little opportunity for social interaction with kids outside the school, the ostracism has effectively extended well beyond the school. The result, I am convinced, has been as traumatic for the child as any physical bullying could be. It is also particularly disturbing because of the amount of thought and planning that has gone into it. This is not just kids reverting to instinctive physical hierarchy-building on a playground, it is a sustained campaign of organized cruelty, aimed at a person that was, until fairly recently, a close friend of many of those involved. Now the whole thing is out in the open, and various methods of intervention are being pursued; I'm not sure how effective they will be. It is relatively easy to punish a child for hitting another child; how do you punish someone for refusing to speak to or acknowledge another child? I've been largely a spectator; none of my children are directly involved, but I have a younger daughter, and I've been asking myself how I would respond if she were involved in something like this, either as participant or initiator. I've yet to come up with a good answer. I asked my son if he knew what was going on, and he replied that of course he did. His only comment, when pressed, was that "Girls are sick". An excessive generalization, of course, but in this particular case I have to say he got it about right.

To: E who wrote (11439)	4/15/2001 10:29:05 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

have to get some things done before The Sopranos, which I hope you're seeing, if you have HBO. HBO??? We barely get the major channels out here in the boonies. We get ABC usually, NBC sometimes, CBS seldom, and PBS rarely. Of course, we do get the Canadian channels, beautifully -- after all, we're line of sight to Victoria, BC only about 15 miles away. But no cable, and no dish. Cable doesn't come within 10 miles of here. I've been thinking about a dish, but it requires line of sight and we would have to cut some trees down, which we couldn't do near the house since that would be within the shoreline management area and a dish wouldn't be an acceptable reason to cut trees, so we would have to cut nearer the road and run a cable, or mount a dish on the top of one of the trees or on an 80 foot mast, but we haven't done any of those yet, so we just don't watch TV, which suits me fine. So I've still never seen the Sopranos, but I get to read a lot of books!) I...was looking forward to pointing out the fundamentalist cruelties, or lack of concern about human suffering, that I feel have been amply displayed here. Do you really think it's fair to generalize about all fundamentalists by the half dozen or so here who identify themselves as fundamentalist, or whose posts are clearly fundamentalist? I have known fundamentalists who are very caring, decent people. My son's boy scout leader was one. He was the minister of a very fundamentalist church here, strict bible believers, hell is an actual place, etc. A hugely decent, caring man, volunteered his time in a lot of local organizations. But never proselytized at all as a scout leader or otherwise. If you asked him directly about his beliefs he just invited you to come to church or to a discussion group there if you were interested. They didn't doorbell or anything. They believed that their lives were their ministry, and that people would see that they had something in their lives worth having and would come to find out about it. IMO far more effective than the JWs with their obnoxious doorbelling. I think SI gathers an abnormal (in a good way) group of people, and you can't generalize from people here. Sure there are some insensitive, uncaring fundamentalists. But not all by any means. There are also some mighty uncaring, insensitive atheists. Madelyn Murray O'Hair, for one. Her son for another. Not the least bit nice. Do you want yourself as an atheist to be judged by them? Do you think it's right for people to look at them and say "I know atheists and I find that atheists are a$$holes, obnoxious, loud, dishonest, inconsiderate, uncaring, and very unpleasant people, so E and X must be that way, too"?

To: E who wrote (11439)	4/15/2001 11:04:32 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Have you read the posts on SI of fundamentalists advocating forcing 13 year old girls pregnant by rape to bear the rapists' children? Forcing gestation of a fertilized egg is more important than any other consideration including common sense. Rules. Definitions. Force. Dismissal of suffering. Banning of RU486. Res ipsa loquitur. Res ipsa loquitur AS LONG AS you don't believe that the fetus is a person. Otherwise, quite the contrary. I'm not even sure you're capable of looking at the consequences of the belief that the fetus is a person. But if you are, I think you will have to agree that FROM THAT WORLDVIEW it is not necessarily uncaring to force a 13 year old girl pregnant by rape to bear her child. You can have enormous sympathy for the girl, recognize that her rape and pregnancy are tragedies, but believe it would be an even greater tragedy to murder an innocent person to save her the trauma of bearing the child. Nine months out of her life to save the live of someone who on average would live 70 years. Is it more caring to destroy seventy years of human live to save a young girl the trauma of bearing a child, or is more caring to require a young woman to give 9 months of her life bearing a child she doesn't wan in order to save an entire lifetime of someone who might find the cure for Cancer? There is no good solution to this situation, but FROM THAT WORLDVIEW choosing life instead of death for one person at the cost of nine months out of the life of another person is NOT necessarily uncaring. Personally, that's not my worldview. But just because I don't subscribe to that worldview doesn't mean I condemn those who do, and consider them uncaring because they have a different approach to caring for human life than I do. From your worldview, they are uncaring about the mental health of a 13 year old girl. From their worldview, you are not only uncaring of the entire life of a person, you are willing to condone murder to save a person the trauma of giving nine months of their life ti bear a child they don't want. And I don't think all fundamentalists simply discount the emotional pain of having to bear the child of a rapist. Is it imposing their beliefs on the girl? Of course. But then, that's what society does. The whole purpose of substantive law is to impose the moral or ethical or religious views of one segment of the population on another segment of the population which does not share those moral or ethical or religious views. That is the primary function of substantive law. (Substantive as opposed to procedural, which tells you to go on green and stop on red, drive on the right, etc.) Is it moral for Bill Gates to have 20 billion dollars all his own while other people face the choice of watching their children starve or stealing food to feed them? Our society says it is. That's a moral viewpoint which we enforce by putting the thief in jail. Is it caring to jail somebody whose child is starving because they tried to steal food to feed it? Our society says it is. Is it okay to allow a parent to kill a child who is in what medical science believes is a permanant coma? The answer depends entirely on your moral worldview and values. Our society says it is not okay to actively kill the child, but it IS okay to withhold food and water from it and let it starve to death or die of thirst. This is caring according to the rules of our society. In other societies, it may well be more caring to actively kill the child rather than let it suffer starvation. I think you need to be very careful when you accuse people of not caring. Sometimes you need to judge them by the standards of their worldviews, and realize that in fact, based on their beliefs, they are extraordinarily caring when under a different worldview they are cruel and vindictive.