We all must stay strong

By now, we all have heard about the slews of bullying. The Tyler Clementi case is probably the one that brought bullying to the forefront again. I just heard about an incident in Mentor, Ohio where a pretty Croatian girl was bullied so badly that she started taking online classes. Sadly, a week later she committed suicide. She had so much to live for...a love of music, a love of dance...a loving home. Who wouldn't like this girl? Yet girls at school were so mean to her, probably they were jealous of her. She tried so hard to stand up to them, yet it wasn't enough. Those girls are deeply mentally ill. They even laughed at her funeral. It makes me want to cry an ocean when I hear of something like this. I know what it's like to be bullied. It never got that bad, but it got bad enough that I reported it to the school administrators...well my mom did. Years later, some of those bullies apologized to me or at least felt ashamed of it. Live! Don't resort to suicide! Wait and see if the bullies ever feel remorse later! If they have a conscience, they will!

Bullying is such a crisis in the world, not just in the United States. I don't know about international cases, but I'm sure they're out there. Why does it happen? What can we do to stop it? Why don't people do more to stop it? If we knew all the answers, the world would be a better place to live in.

It's tragic occurrences like this that should make us feel less unhappy about how problematic our lives are. We all have problems, but not all of them are as difficult to handle as being bullied. If we can complain and we don't feel inferior to anybody, then we are lucky. I know how easy it is to complain, I still do it a lot. I feel grateful that I had my mother behind me when I felt angry and frustrated with how people treated me in grade school. It would be unwise of me to just say that we just have to believe in ourselves to get through hard times. What we all really need most is for people to support us and really make an effort to stop the bullying. In my case, if those people had not been confronted by the principal and had not been embarassed, they would not have stopped and I would have had a breakdown. One boy even cried, I really couldn't believe it. I even felt bad for him, which most people would find strange. As I saw with the Croatian girl's case, even standing up for oneself isn't enough. The administration should have done more to get the girls off her back. Unfortunately, they didn't. Again and again we see that people see the wrongs going on, but they don't pick up a finger to improve matters...they let it happen. Why? Is it laziness, lack of caring...what?! It really infuriates me. It seems savage to me. We can help, so why do we just watch?!

Here's a video by Black-eyed Peas. It's an old song, but a relevant song. Where is the love? Don't we care? Isn't it a crime to just watch while innocent, good people die before our eyes? Think about it.