Bullying kids learn tactics from our bullying culture

Ask any principal about the school's bullying policy and she'll tell you about no tolerance, first offenses and punishments. Walk the halls and you'll find anti-bullying posters, like the one in my local middle school that reads, "What is right is not always popular. What is popular is not always right."

Those outside the educational system agree: bullying is wrong. Every magazine from "Time" to "Family Circle" features articles that address and condemn the issue. Even the government is getting in on the action, as many states have anti-bullying laws.

All that is fine and good. Unfortunately, it won't really impact our children unless our bullying culture decides it's time to change.

Sometime in the last few decades our collective narrative has slipped into the toilet. Today, we take great pleasure collectively mocking (um ... bullying) everyone, from the once-respected stateswoman to the everyday man whose YouTube video has the great misfortune to go viral.

In addition, people who might otherwise deserve our greatest respect are regularly shredded more thoroughly than 15-year-old tax documents. Nothing and no one is sacred or spared. Not the Pope. Not the elderly. Certainly, not the president.

"A priest walks into a bar," we begin, and we laugh. Oh, how we laugh. Just about everyone is stupid, and every human gaffe is fodder for late night television and talk radio.

Public bullying and humiliation are not only acceptable, they're encouraged. After all, these are hard times, we argue. We deserve to laugh. If that laughter comes at another's expense, well that's just too dang bad.

As a culture, it appears that we have lost our sense of reverence. Albert Schweitzer said, "If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life."

A culture without reverence is in fast decline. I wonder what it will take to restore our sense of reverence and respect once again.

Most likely it will take a miracle since we protect our society-wide bullying narrative as an unalienable right which is protected by the First Amendment. I suppose our forefathers assumed that we would operate under the laws of common decency when they wrote the Bill of Rights. But they were wrong.

It is quite astonishing that our culture believes that all communication should be protected, even when it wrongly accuses, mocks or is uncivil. When cultural bullies are called out, they wave away concern, saying that the offended are simply too sensitive. "Lighten up," they say. "It's just a joke."

It's only when threatened with a slander lawsuit that the bullies are momentarily silenced.

Technology has made our cultural bullying easier than ever. These days we can say whatever we want online anonymously, disguising our identities with cutesy names behind which we browbeat and degrade one another.

Words – even those from anonymous sources – are painful weapons. Cultural bullies who take shots as they hide behind false identities are modern day snipers.

All the while, our children are listening, watching and reading. They're developing communication patterns, mimicking the way we feast on the reputations of others over airwaves and screens. They're building their own senses of humor laced with sarcasm, innuendo and caustic opinion. And they're taking what they're learning to school.

Then, when they imitate the cultural bullying narrative and direct it at their peers, they get in trouble for it. We adults slap their hands, give them detention or suspend them, shaking our heads as we wonder where children learned to treat their peers in such malicious and shameful ways.

For the answer, culture needs to look no further than its very own mirror.
