Will being nice and caring stop school bullies?

I’ll start right off with the bottom line: being “nice” and “caring” won’t help kids stop relentless school bullies. Why not?

I’ve been interviewed a lot on radio and TV.  But when I ask those interviewers how they stopped bullying when they were kids, almost all the women say they were never taught how to stop bullies.  Instead, their well-meaning moms told them:

• Bullies have a hard life so we should have sympathy for what they’re going through and how low their self-esteem must be.
• Don’t sink to the bully’s level by fighting back.  You have it easy so you should rise above the bullies.
• If you’re nice enough, kind enough and loving enough, bullies will respond by being nice in return.
• You should never push back – verbally or physically.  If you push back, it means you don’t care.
• Violence is morally wrong and violence never solves anything.  They cite Mahatma Gandhi as someone who stopped the British without pushing back and by preaching tolerance and love.

All these women now bear a grudge against their well-meaning mothers.  Those messages are all wrong.  These women learned the hard way that the way you identify relentless bullies is that “nice” and “caring” don’t convert them from predators to friends.

First, the statement about Gandhi is a complete misunderstanding of his tactics.  Applying ahimsa to relentless bullies is not a good comparison.  If Gandhi had tried his tactics against Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao or the founder of Pakistan, he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes.

Second, violence was required to stop slavery, Nazism, Fascism and communism, to name just a few.

Third, you have to love yourself first.  Sometimes, the most caring thing you can do for someone who’s a jerk and a bully is to show them that their tactics don’t work.  They’d better learn new tactics.

Fourth, you can’t love relentless bullies enough to change how they treat you.  Ignoring, minimizing and “rising above” do not stop relentless bullies.  Appeasement, begging and bribery do not stop relentless bullies.

Fifth, you’re not the bully’s therapist; it’s not your job to rehabilitate them.  The adults have that responsibility, but only after they protect and defend the targets of bullying.

Appeasement is never effective with determined boundary pushers who always want more.  If you suffer in silence, if you whine, or if you advertise that you’re afraid bullies think you’re a victim waiting to be bullied.  If you are kind, bullies think you are weak.  They’ll continue to harass and abuse you.

Don’t waste time complaining about your society, the media, your parents, your friends, your school officials, or how hard it is.

It’s your job to protect and defend your personal space from predators.  It’s your job to make bullies a small part of your mental and emotional world so you can get on with your education and your life

You must be determined, courageous and strong in defending and protecting yourself – not because you deserve it, but because you want to, you have to.  “I want to” is more than enough reason to protect yourself.

You must learn how to push back verbally, to get help from school officials, your parents and the police, and to fight back when you have to and you can.

You have to succeed even though conditions haven’t been prepared perfectly for you.  Don’t starve while you’re waiting for someone else to set the table.  You have to overcome obstacles; it’s a sign of good character.

You may be a target; don’t be a victim!

What’s the price of tolerating bullies; slow erosion of your soul.

Since all tactics depend on the situation, expert coaching by phone or Skype helps.  We can design a plan that fits you and your situation.  And build your will and skill to carry it out effectively.

Are You Defeated by Defeat?

What do you do after you’ve been hit hard and knocked down by life?  What do you do after your dreams have been shattered?  What do you do after you’ve been rejected or lost everything?  What do you do when you’ve been defeated?  What do you do when you realize you chose an abusive bully and you don’t know how to protect your kids?  The wisdom of the ages, from all traditions and cultures, gives the same answer, even if the reasons are very different. In “The Ghost and the Darkness,” Val Kilmer plays a British engineer trying to build a bridge across a river in Africa.  Two lions, accurately named “The Ghost” and “The Darkness” begin stalking and killing the men building the bridge.  The lions outsmart every attempt to trap and kill them.

Finally, Val Kilmer develops a brilliant plan to trap one of the lions in a railroad car.  They do trap the lion but he escapes, burning down the car.  Kilmer is devastated and defeated.

The killings mount until the workers start leaving.  They hire a skilled hunter, Michael Douglas, who is also caustic and sarcastic.  At the climax to the first half of the movie, when the hunter sees Kilmer’s dejection and hears of Kilmer’s failed plan, he says, “There’s an old saying in boxing, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get hit and knocked down.  Then the plan goes out the window.  What matters is what you do after you’ve been hit and knocked down.  Do you stay down or do you get up and fight again?’”

There it is.  Kilmer faces his plans in ashes and his life as a failure because the men will leave, the bridge will be abandoned and he’ll never get another job.

The tension comes to a head when Douglas has a plan but the lions outsmart him and kill all the wounded men in the hospital.  Douglas, the great hunter, is devastated and defeated.  In total, the lions killed over a hundred men.

Kilmer says to him, “There’s an old saying in boxing, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get hit and knocked down.  Then the plan goes out the window.  What matters is what you do after you’ve been hit and knocked down.  Do you stay down or do you get up and fight again?’”

There it is; the point of the movie; the point for all of us in the real world.  Will we be defeated by defeat, will we give up when we’re back to square-one, will we give up when life is unfair or too destructive for us or will we get up and fight again, build again?

We, who don’t face killer lions everyday, still do face risk and disaster everyday by:

• Human agency – we get fired, we put our savings down on the wrong stock, we give our retirement money to the wrong Ponzi scheme, some maniac or drunk driver kills people we love, some crazy person kills us and 10 others at work, we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time when a riot, revolution or war breaks out, our parents are toxic, our grown children won’t let us see our grandchildren or our spouse is negative, harassing, bullying and destroying our kids’ self-esteem and confidence, and running away means being broke.
• Natural forces – tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, prolonged drought or flood.

Even the smaller failures growing up can seem like disaster – we fail a test or a course, we’re rejected or dumped by someone gorgeous or handsome, our secrets are spread over school or the internet, we don’t make a team we’d hoped for or counted on, we don’t get into the school of our choice, our parents don’t or can’t give us the latest stuff, the cool kids scorn us, we do something really embarrassing. Our children face the same questions repeatedly: Will we be defeated by defeat; will we give up when we’re back to square-one; will we give up when life is unfair or too destructive for us or will we get up and fight again, build again?

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” Eleanor Roosevelt.

As adults, our job is to:

• Teach kids to get up and fight and build again, no matter what happens, no matter how unfair, no matter how devastating.  Remember the sign on the bridge to Terabithia, “Nothing Crushes Us.”
• Be models of great-hearted human beings who are not defeated by defeat; who don’t give in to depression and discouragement; but instead, who get up and fight and build again.  Our job is to be models of courage, strength and resilience in the face of whatever life holds for us.  Our job is to be models in the hope that our children will be inspired to be as great-hearted.

Notice, I ignored whether Douglas and Kilmer finally kill the lions.  Yes that’s important to building the bridge and to the material parts of their lives.  But that’s not important to the human spirits of Kilmer and Douglas being great because they’re undefeated by defeat; to them having the indomitable will to continue, no matter the obstacles and not knowing whether they’ll succeed.  Okay; the factual resolution is that the Ghost and the Darkness are now preserved in the Field Museum in Chicago – and they did kill that many people.

“Strength comes not from physical capacity.   It comes from indomitable will,” Gandhi.

Notice, I also ignored the historical implications of colonialism.  Of course, that’s there, but that’s not the main point for my life.

The point is to use the movie to stimulate in me the greatest that I can be.  There are thousands of heroes and heroines, real and fictional, who can remind us to get up off the floor when life has knocked us down.  The point is to use everything I see and hear to inspire me to choose whether to live a selfish, shabby, sordid story or a great and worthy story; to chose to be the hero of my life.

“Glory is not in never having been knocked down.  Glory is in rising up again, each time you are knocked down,” Vince Lombardi.

Is non-violent resistance really effective against bullies?

The success of Mahatma Gandhi and non-violent protest or non-violent resistance is often cited as absolute proof that such non-violent methods can defeat oppression and stop bullies.  That idea is often linked to the assertions that the world was a simpler place back when people came together face to face, a small group of committed people can change the world and there’s nothing we can’t accomplish. As much as I almost always try non-violent techniques first, I disagree strongly.  You’re better off thinking of non-violent protest as a method, a strategy or a tactic; not as a philosophy.

Let’s examine non-violent protest as if its truth as a philosophy can be tested against history.

Gandhi-ji was successful against the British and I wouldn’t argue that any other tactic he could have employed would have succeeded.  But his success only proves that in that particular circumstance, lead by that unique individual spirit, the tactic of non-violent protest was successful in getting the British to leave India.  Do you think that non-violent resistance would have been effective in India in 1857?  Or that it would help the Indian people now against Pakistan (or vice versa) or against the Muslim terrorists who recent launched their attacks in Mumbai?

I remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement.   I was actually in Chicago when he led the march and rally.  Do you think he would have succeeded in leading a march in Chicago in 1920 or New York in the 1830’s (read about the mass atrocities and killings during the riots there)?  Do you think the movement would have succeeded integrating schools in the South without the Federal troops willing to shoot?

Gandhi and Dr. King were in the right places at the right times for the methods they chose.  Would either have even gotten obituaries in the newspapers if they tried non-violent protest in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur, or against the Ayatollah or Sadam Hussein, just to name a few?

The wisdom and lessons of history are clear, whether we like them or not.  They’re found in the great literature of the world, as well as in the facts we know:

• The world was never a simpler place.  Try living your life on a self-sufficient farm, especially when the locusts or drought or flood or fire comes.  Or when a conquering horde comes over the hill to kill all the men and take the women and children into slavery.  That was dealing with problems face to face.  Remember in the Iliad what happened to mighty Hector’s wife and son.  No unemployment insurance, retirement funds or welfare.
• A small group of people can change the world.  Usually that’s what has happened, whether they start a Renaissance or a dictatorship or they’re called the Founding Fathers or Mothers.
• Although there are many things we’ve accomplished through science and technology in the physical, material world, there are many things we can’t accomplish in the organic, living world.  We will never have world peace.  We will never have a global society that encourages and makes possible everyone’s individual freedom.  Power is a reality of human nature, not freedom (as much as we Americans value it).  Protecting me and mine against you and yours, or people grabbing what they want is a reality of human nature.
• In response to a question about peaceful, non-violent protest being effective when facing Chinese soldiers with machine guns, the Dali Lama said, about two years ago, that had we stood there and prayed and chanted and reasoned, they simply would have shot us all.  Similarly, the Quakers in Pennsylvania were barred from holding office because their peaceful methods did not protect the colonists they served from Indian attacks.
• History shows that, for the most part, those who succeed practicing non-violence live in caves, deserts, misty mountains or monasteries.  Usually, they live on practically nothing or are supported and taken care of by people who brave the world in which violence is a probability.  For example, Gandhi could live poor and politically active because, in part, he was supported by the efforts and money of one of the richest women in India.

To think that we can have sustainable world peace is to indulge in childhood, magical thinking – very 60’s and 70’s.

So what can we do?  Keep working at it; be strong, skillful and resilient in your efforts; think strategically, being right isn’t enough.

Start with your personal world.  Deal effectively and individually with the bullies you find, whether they be face to face or cyberbullies, bullies at work, home or school.  Help make laws against those behaviors, but if you want society or the government to actively guarantee security, you will create Big Brother and you won’t like the consequences.

Think of non-violent protest and reasoning as initial tactics to employ.  Sometimes they’ll be effective.  Bullies will show you if non-violent protest enough to stop them.  But if non-violent resistance doesn’t stop a bully, you have to be more clever and firm.  History actually shows that usually the best way to prepare for peace is to be strong enough to wage war successfully, despite the seductively catchy bumper sticker to the contrary.  Remember, no method succeeds everywhere and every when.

Prepare yourself to be ecstatic and joyful in the world the way it is, whether you decide to change it or not.  That joy and ecstasy are signs of the saints.  As much as the world is full of all the awful things we can think of, it’s also full of beauty, grace, love and nobility.  Fill yourself with joy in the face of the full range of life.

If you can’t be happy until the world is totally peaceful and all the problems are solved, you’ll have a lousy life.  That would be a waste of your potential for wonder, awe and joy, as well as for effecting change … even knowing that change won’t last beyond your life span.