when dad is just as bad as the bullies

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

AS A TARGET OF BUL­LIES most of my high school years, I have grown up as a rea­son­ably ‘con­trolled’ adult (I have a veeeeeery long, veeeeeery slow-burning fuse to my once hair-trigger temper), con­sti­tu­tion­ally and philo­soph­i­cally anti-violence in­sti­ga­tion (versus the ne­ces­sity of using vi­o­lence in de­fense), but quite ca­pable of taking care of my­self. (Of course, being a 200-pound 6-footer tends to dis­suade most people from get­ting in my face.) 1

Nonethe­less, due to the bul­lying, I have al­most zero tol­er­ance for bul­lies, wher­ever and when­ever I see them. Upon hearing of the Columbine High School mas­sacre in 1999, I did not im­me­di­ately as­sume the shooters were bul­lies or that they were stoners or that they were vic­tims of de­pres­sion or that they were hyp­no­tized by back­ward masked Sa­tanic mes­sages on their heavy metal albums.

No, upon hearing of the Columbine High School mas­sacre I turned to Berni and said, “Wanna bet they were two loners who were bul­lied every day?”

Of course, she did not take the bet.

Which brings me to a video that showed up as part of my daily email from Up­worthy and ad­dresses two things: human be­ings who grow up with someone on the in­side who doesn’t look like the someone on the out­side, and bul­lying. This video is ti­tled “This kid’s dad is just as bad as the bul­lies at school until he makes me smile at the end.”

 

I was moved by the brief story and for­warded it to all my email con­tacts and I also posted it on my Face­book pages and those of family and friends. While showing it to Berni later in the day, a thought came to me: the pro­ducers of this four-minute video should pull it from dis­tri­b­u­tion and find a writer to turn this into a ninety-minute movie. I can see this as an attention-getter, al­though not nec­es­sarily a blockbuster.

But as a film ad­dressing the topics of trans­gender chil­dren, ha­rass­ment and bul­lying in schools, and the need for the sup­port of one’s par­ents against the bul­lying re­gard­less of the rea­sons would grab not only the pub­lic’s at­ten­tion but also that of the Academy Award voters.  2

Fi­nally, I have also posted the above on my Rather Rare Records site but with an ad­di­tional sec­tion on Hollysiz, the singer whose song The Light ac­com­pa­nies the video above. It is ti­tled “fads and hol­lyliz let the light come through.”

 


FOOT­NOTES:

1   No­tice that I said “a” target of bul­lies, not “the” target. That’s be­cause while the victim of bul­lying feels very much alone when picked on, bul­lies rarely pick on just one kid or person. No, they are much more egal­i­tarian, usu­ally having sev­eral if not many tar­gets. As Teddy Roo­sevelt might have said, “Bully for them!”

2   De­spite the fact that the actor who plays the fa­ther in the video re­sem­bles none other than every­one’s fa­vorite physi­cist Dr. Sheldon Cooper, the first thought for the role of the bul­lying fa­ther in my pro­jected movie was Brad Pitt, but any suit­ably ‘male’ actor would do. . .

 

 

 

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