Jonathan Martin walked away from his big ticket NFL job with the Miami Dolphins recently because he was being tormented by his teammates. I’m going to stipulate the torment. The article I’m linking to spells out some crazy-bad treatment and even if we get into a court of law and the Dolphins prove to a jury that none of this stuff happened, Jonathan Martin thought it was bad enough to walk. (I know it’s bad when all the nasty words are partially asterisked out, and I don’t even know what they all mean. My kids have driven everywhere with me, and they’ll testify that the swear word doesn’t exist that I don’t know.)

So the Dolphins are bullies. (I could say something here about how this is what happens when you make your mascot a seemingly-friendly-but-really-psychotic aquatic-mammal-and-slap-a-football-helmet-on-its-head, but I’m trying to be serious here.) As a career Human Resources Professional, I can tell you that sometimes you wind up working with a bunch of jerks. Sometimes your management team will deal with the jerks, and you can be happy about coming to work again. Sometimes the management team will also be a bunch of jerks (Helpful Tip: jerks frequently hire jerks) and you may decide to cut your losses and go elsewhere.

But be warned in your search: Bullies are everywhere these days, and you can’t swing a tortured soul without hitting an Anti-Bullying Awareness Ribbon, Day, Workshop, or Symposium. And I can see why…the effects are tragic. It seems like once a week a pre-teen does something drastic to him/herself or others because one or more of their peers decided to gang up and make today Torment A Tween Peer Day.

All the awareness campaigns are pointing at the bullies, and the people who don’t do anything to stop it, which makes a fair amount of sense. When you make a ribbon for say, prostate cancer, you focus on the thing causing the problem, not the people suffering from the problem. So the Anti-Bullying Days, Months, Laws and whatnot focus on enjoining everyone to be kind (that’s a good thing) and requesting that bystanders speak up (also important).

I think that we’re missing something else here, and I’ve been hesitant to say it because all six of you who read me are going to explode with cries of VICTIM SHAMING when I say it:

One of The Great Principles of Life is that I can’t control anything you do, not even with a law. All I can do is control my reaction to it. 

The bullying construct we’re most familiar with is the big kid shaking the little kid down in the playground for his lunch money. The thing about bullying these days is that it’s turning into an onslaught of verbal harassment from everyone. Facebook is the great equalizer: you don’t have to outweigh your victim to make him cry uncle. You just have to be able to type really fast and only have to spell well enough to get your vicious little point across. And if you’re feeling creative, make a page called “Elizabeth Evans Is A Fat Dumbass” and get a lot of people to join it.

And while I will not say that verbal abuse doesn’t mean anything, I will say that verbal abuse from people who have no actual power over you is something that can be overcome, and we need to give our kids (and apparently our offensive linebackers) the tools to withstand it.

I don’t think we’re doing that as a society. By trying to control everyone’s speech so no one ever hurts anyone ever, we’re saying, “Yes, words are weapons as powerful as guns, and we’re going to control what you say by stomping on the First Amendment, too.” We’re implying that kids can’t handle the dumb, mean crap that other kids say, and so we are making our children powerless with our assumptions. We’re confirming our children’s worst fear: that these rude, abusive twerps do, in fact, have power over them, oh and by the way, setting them up for problems when they become adults and have to learn how to deal with these rude twerps and their parents aren’t there to organize an awareness campaign to deal with them, or maybe they will be…do helicopter parents ever land?

Whenever anything critical is said to anyone anymore, the speaker is accused of ‘shaming’ and ‘bullying’ and taken to task; mostly by amateur pundits, but sometimes by laws that are trying to infer intent and then punishing for it. I don’t know about you, but that’s getting too Orwellian for my tastes. 

You might be thinking, “Well, that’s easy for you to say, Bess…you’re all smooth and sophisticated and popular. What do YOU know about being bullied?” Personal disclosure: by today’s standards, I was probably bullied as a kid. I was awkward and overweight and smartassed-brainy and was named after a cow (all the literary cows are named ‘Bessie’) and caught all kinds of grief for that unfortunate combination. I’m the youngest of five, so I was skilled at handling such things, and so I formed my own posse of friends (probably also bullied by today’s standards) and turned on the lifelong grow lights for a thick skin. I don’t know what the outcome would have been if my parents had caught wind of this and decided that all the bad words were hurting their special snowflake. I know for a fact that I would never have developed the ‘rub some spit on it’ attitude that I wound up developing, a mindset that has proved invaluable in later years.

Maybe it would have been a mindset that could have helped Jonathan Martin.

© E. Stocking Evans 2013