Monday, January 10, 2005

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.”
Harassment is wrong. Just the sound of the word “harassment” makes my blood boil. For me, harassment stands for the sorrow of one human being, stands for a human being’s feeling of being minute at the hands of another human being’s ego. Yet it is among us every day. What is the purpose of harassment, anyway? It has no larger cause, no significant meaning behind it- just the fact that somebody assumes that they are more superior than somebody else. So why do people act this way? Why do people find so much pleasure and humor out of causing another human being to feel horrid about themselves?
In The Declaration of Independence, the parchment reads “Every man is created equal.” Yet people do not live up to that. Some people feel that if somebody is different, if they do not have the appearance of the media‘s “norm“, or talk like popular people talk, or have the same interests, cultures, or personalities as they do, then those people who are different are lower than the rest of the people. People judge different people before they even get to know them, and group them in with a certain social group, even if they actually do not belong in that group. Besides, what is the use of “social groups” in the first place? Why can’t a student be allowed to fit into all kinds of different “groups”? Some kids just do not fit into one certain classification.
It’s not just people who are our elders, who live on their own in the real world, either. You can find it in any school you enter and observe for a little bit. Every day I walk through the halls in our school and see some poor student getting insulted, minimized. I can sit in a classroom, and when the teacher’s back is turned or when a teacher leaves the room, ignorant students who think they are better than others throw things at students who appear different from the rest, or tell somebody harsh things, or insult those students who are different than the rest. They never grant those different students a rest, even when their actions are brought to the attention of a teacher or the principal. They seem not to care if they get in trouble or not, just so long as they can make themselves feel better about themselves by making somebody else feel lower.
Now, I don’t think it is all the students’ fault, or the people in the real world. Nor do I believe that all the people insult others to make themselves feel better. Sometimes harassment is what we are used to, what we have grown up to see as something that is done. We live in a community that is surrounded by harassment, of one scale or another. You can go home and find that your parents are insulting some company, or some neighbor, or their family member. You can overhear your siblings making fun of one of their classmates. You can find friends in the cafeteria making fun of some kid that doesn’t fit their description of the “norm.” Students seem to be surrounded by harassment nowadays. Our communities have come to the point where we are used to having harassment be a part of our behaviors. A lot of the people nowadays, adults or minors alike, find it allowed to have that kind of behavior. I am not to be excluded from the group that does this harassment. Whether I mean to or not, I find myself making rude comments, just because that is what everybody else is doing. I don’t think half of us do it to actually be mean- we just do it because that is what everybody else is doing.
Does this make it okay though? Does the knowledge of everybody doing it make the action justifiable? Is it alright for people to make fellow human beings, who are made equal from the day they are born, lower than they actually are, no matter the reason we do the harassing? No, it is not alright.
I know for a fact how those people who are insulted day in and day out feel like. Every morning they wake up groaning about having to attend school, for they worry about what kind of torment they have to face from their peers. Those students who are “different” arrive at their school and overhear the rude comments that are pointed at their direction, and either freeze or get angry and lash out at the person who made the comment. Then they get in trouble for lashing out. Soon they lose confidence in themselves, they lose the courage to stand up for themselves. They start to believe the rude comments made about them, and start to consider the actions people have suggested they do. They lose sight of who they are, and only see what people want them to see. They fall in a pitch black, bottomless pit in which they have lost site of the exit.
A man called Rabbi Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

We, as human beings, as people who are made equal in all aspects, need to listen to Rabbi Hillel. We need to find a way to accept that all people are different, yet that we are equal in rights. We need find a way to terminate all this torment, for that is what harassment is for the people on the receiving end. We cannot cause all this to happen altogether in one great bound, yet we can stop it, taking little baby steps at a time. Maybe in our grandchildren’s generation, or even in our children’s generation, if we take action now, that generation will not have to stress over how somebody looks, or how somebody’s personality is, or what somebody’s interests are, and will look deeper into a person’s soul and see for themselves what that person is really like. we can do that, if we can make the world a better place in some way or another, isn’t that more worth while than wasting our breath on insults? Wouldn’t that be a much better world to live in, where all the colors of a person can be seen, respected, and admired for their differences?


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