Aslaug's Axe Shed

I am writing this letter to adults. If children or young people read it, that’s as may be, but I am hoping this letter will reach adult eyes, hopefully in many places around the world. This is a letter about bullies. And no, this is not a letter to the parents of children getting bullied, as I am sure we all know there are plenty such pleas on the Internet already. Pleas that pretty much universally say what needs to be said, far better than I am able to.

No, this is a letter to the parents of bullies.

I hold no illusions. I know many of you out there will not read past the first paragraph. Many will say “My children are not bullies” and leave it at that. I know some of you will even say “It’s not my problem”. I even know a few of you will say “If my children are bullies, it’s because the children they pick on are not strong enough to fend them off.”

I’m not going to get teary-eyed about this. I’m not going to make some impassioned statement that I’m a survivor of bullying, because in this context, whether I am or not is irrelevant. This is about facts. However, examples will be needed, and I will need to use my own experiences for that. So yes, I have been bullied, and very severely at that.

But bottom line, this is about parents loving their children.

I don’t doubt for a moment, that most parents love their children. And I don’t doubt that this goes for the parents of bullies as well. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen how the worst of bullies can come from good, stable homes, where their parents try to teach them good, solid values to take with them. But children can be both deceptive and incredible vicious. As they do not have the same filters with which to perceive the world, as adults with many more years of experience with cause-and-effect, they do not always fully comprehend the possible outcome of their actions.

And sadly, many parents wear blinders when it comes to their kids.

I am not saying that bullies are victims, because anyone who has been on the receiving end of years of put-downs and belittlements, will tell you that such talk is insulting and completely beside the point. This is about boundaries and limits, and simple, decent child-rearing.

“My children are not bullies”. And you know what? You may be right. Your kid may in fact be one of the great majority of children, who are not. But bullying takes a great many forms, and the old, idiotic axiom that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me”, was written by bullies. Not by their victims. Names hurt. In fact, names hurt a lot. They make a child feel different, unwelcome and outside the group at a time of age where “belonging” and membership of a community is of crucial importance. Have you ever heard your children speak ill of one of their classmates? Laugh at them for what clothes they wear? The colour of their skin or their hair? There are myriads of ways of making someone feel different, unwelcome and like an outsider. Have you heard your children speak ill of the “fat kid”, “the fag”, “the ugly kid”, “The Ginger” or any such thing? If you have, and you haven’t immediately stepped in to stop it, and stop it both firmly and with authority … chances are, you helped make a child’s life utterly miserable. Inactivity in the face of possible bullying is the same as silent complicity, and bullying destroys lives. It is difficult for someone who has not been the victim of bullying to understand how destructive it is, but during a time of life where we are meant to learn who we are, what the victims of bullying learn, is that they are worthless, useless and unlovable.

As an adult and as a parent, you are directly responsible for your child’s behaviour. This is a part of the responsibility you take upon yourself, when you become a parent. It means raising the child, and it means taking the good with the bad. All children misbehave at times, and all children have to be corrected. It’s part of learning, growing up, and becoming a whole person, and it is part of what made most of us the people we are. Being taught is what childhood is for, and humanity is unusual amongst animals, in that we have a very long learning period. There is ample time to teach these things to children, but while much of it can come from school and society as a whole, the most important part of child-rearing has to come from the parents. And child-rearing, amongst other things, means occasionally having to do something unpleasant.

Like telling your child that what he or she is doing is completely unacceptable, that you are aware of their aberrant behaviour, and that you will not accept it anymore. And that because of that behaviour, they will be sanctioned in some way.

Disavowing any knowledge of your child being a bully does not make the implications any less devastating for the victims, and more and more stories emerge of the horrible consequences of this. When I was a child, I attended a school where bullying did not exist. It did not exist because the headmaster staunchly, publicly and very vocally refused to acknowledge its existence. Kids suffered the most aggravating abuses from their peers in that school, because according to the headmaster, bullying did not exist in his school. If he acknowledged it, he would have had to take action against it. It was easier for him this way, and if kids suffered … well, according to him they didn’t, because after all, bullying didn’t exist.

He’s just one example from that day and age. In the 1980′s, bullying was still seen as taboo, and it was best to not talk about it … and in reality, it was probably the kid’s own fault. I had a terrible temper, and my parents kept telling me when I came home from school in tears, that if I only didn’t get angry, it wouldn’t be fun for the bullies to harass me. For years that was the line I was met with when I tried to seek some kind of comfort with my parents. In the end, I stopped telling them about it, because I already knew what they would say, and mind you … I know my parents were better than many. They actually did try a few times to get something done about the problem.

The difference-maker in my situation was a kid I used to play with as a child. One day, out of nowhere, without any warning whatsoever, he too turned on me and joined the bullies. Jeering, cajoling, laughing and pointing fingers. It felt like someone yanked the base of my world out from underneath me. I turned around and I hit him. It was a reaction born from panic and desperation and his only response was to look at me and sneer “It’s over!”

Amidst the laughter of the chorus of bullies, the demeaning shouts, the horrific taunts … I went home, completely dissolved in tears. I told my parents I was never going back to that school. I was in flat out panic. I shouted I wasn’t going back. Not ever.

I couldn’t.

This is why my parents were better than most. They finally acknowledged the depth of the problem, and had me moved to another school. I never sat foot in the classroom where that last scene had played out again. Not once, in the 24 years since that scene played out have I stepped foot inside that building again, but I have driven past it a couple of times since, and seeing that huge, red, brick-building rise in front of me, to this day, fills me with a deep-seated dread and an incredible sadness. This was a place where I should have felt safe, and instead, it was a place of daily torture.

The bullies who made my life difficult could have been your children. Not your neighbour’s, not your colleague’s … yours.

Some of the worst of them were the children of good families, with nice parents. Some of the nicest kids had the most ignorant and almost wilfully stupid parents. You can never tell. But the one thing that typified the bullies was that their parents refused to accept complicity. One of the worst of them, a kid I still detest to this day, lost his mother to cancer, and when the teacher told us all to be nice to him when he came back after the funeral, I distinctly remember thinking “Why should I? He’s never nice to me!”

That thought scares me today. That I was so full of hate that I couldn’t feel sorry for someone for losing his mother.

But I was lucky. I got out of there in time.

These days, bullying is no longer the same taboo as it was back then. These days, we hear stories of children driven to suicide or murder by their bullies, and we are outraged. How can anyone force a child to such extremes, we ask ourselves? How can anyone be so mean to a child?

We ask ourselves that, as adults. But some of us were bullies ourselves when we were children, and some of those who are outraged, are the parents of children who are guilty of these very things.

“But my children are not bullies”.

Face facts, and acknowledge that any child may be. Deal with it. Deal with it at home, when you suspect there is the least chance of it being the case. Deal with it in public. Deal with it with the school, with the children, with the victims.
No one should have to go home in the second grade, wondering if suicide isn’t better and less painful than going to school the next day. No one should have to think that a razorblade is their best friend, because at least when they cut themselves, they don’t feel numb anymore.

No one should cry themselves to sleep at night, hoping against hope that they won’t wake up the next morning to face another day in school.

Bullying, contrary to what my old headmaster thought, does exist. It is real, and it is terrifying. It marks lives, not for a few days or a few hours, or even a few months, but permanently. It leads to loneliness, pain and anguish. It leads to premature deaths.

We are human beings … capable of rational thought and higher reasoning. We are endowed with the capacity to feel deep emotions and to reflect on these emotions for many, many years. We are equipped with a memory unrivalled in nature, and daily fear, pain and loneliness is not simply forgotten, nor can its cause simply be dismissed as “the way children are”. Children can be awfully mean, even evil to one another. But they can also be incredibly nice and gentle.

It is up to their parents to make sure they are the latter, rather than the former.

Think about it: what kind of person do you want to be responsible for releasing into society?

All anti-bullying campaigns target the children themselves. Telling them how much it hurts. But they already know this, and they do it anyway, because they want to inflict that pain. They don’t see the consequences, and for a child, out of sight truly is out of mind. Some campaigns try to tell children that it isn’t cool to be a bully, but even when this message is delivered by kids themselves, it is still a campaign planned by adults, and since when did children listen to adults when it came to what is cool and what isn’t, in the first place?

If we want bullying to stop, it has to be stopped where it begins.

With the parents.

Because yes, it IS your responsibility.

Because the next time, we read about a child having taken his or her own life in the newspapers, it may be YOUR child who took part in driving the victim to that extreme.

Please don’t wear blinders. Please don’t close your eyes.

Please act.

You are the only one who can.

Respectfully,

Joan Høj Jacobsen

Here is chapter 1 of Nachter

In HTML, In PDF

Prologue Chapter 2

A long time ago, I wrote a blog entry about the ugliness of holocaust denial and historical revisionism. I did so because I had seen a lot of it leading up to the blog-entry, both domestically and internationally, and because it is a topic that gets me extremely riled. What I did not expect was for anyone outside my usual circle of readers to notice what I had to say.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that my blog-post is one of many listed on The Jewish American History Month’s site. Or Anti-semitism.net (which despite its name is NOt an anti-semitic site, but a site where the administrators collect internet debate-entries about anti-semitism). Or even a few others.

I was quite surprised.

I guess someone liked what I had to say.

The original blog post is now over a year old, but I think it’s time for me to reiterate some of the things I said then.

When a man like the Iranian president goes up on the United Nations speaker’s podium and begins a three hour diatribe about how the Holocaust never happened, he is only doing so as a provocation. He knows it happened. He and practically everyone else who denies it happened not only knows it happened, but they -dearly- regret not having been a part of it. No one is ever going to convince me that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his entire ilk wouldn’t have absolutely loved to throw the Zyklon-B crystals into the gaschambers themselves.

But failing that, what they thrive on now, is angering the rest of us.

There is an Internet phenomenon that most of you are no doubt familiar with, called “Trolling”. Trolls are people who take part in Internet debates solely and exclusively with the intent of angering and upsetting others. These sad souls get some kind of semi-perverse kick out of seeing everyone else react to them with anger and affront, because that is PRECISELY what they want. They want to provoke … just for the sake of provoking.

This is what Holocaust denial truly is, in my opinion. The deniers know that it took place, but they are terrified that the debate about the justification of it will die out. If it does … if people finally universally accept that the Holocaust took place, that the Shoah was not a fiction thought up in the mind of some American lobbyist or other … then they will be ignored.

Being ignored is what terrifies these people more than anything else. Being irrellevant and unimportant, relegated to the dustbins of historical archives as maniacs and hysterics, scares the living daylights out of them.

And that is exactly why we shouldn’t give them what they want. As the Internet phenonemon says … “Don’t feed the troll”.

When someone tries to deliberately provoke an angry response out of someone, the worst thing one can do is to give them that angry response. By doing so, the provocation itself is vindicated.

However, we must not turn the other cheek either. And in this case, this is not a religiously based statement on my behalf, either. In this case, we really mustn’t do this. We mustn’t give these people reason to feel, that they can continue their lunacy.

We have to laugh them out. That is the sad, simple truth. We have to ridicule them. I recently came across someone (which is why I began looking for my old blog-post in the first place) who, in the midst of a conversation about the issue, uttered doubts that the Holocaust had REALLY taken place. And then came the classic denier’s strategy:

“But there are no signed orders by Hitler” …

“Yes, but it is impossible mathematically to kill that many people in that short a time”

And so on and so forth.

My response, to my own surprise, was not to get angry with him. I looked at him with a great deal of pity, and then I began talking babytalk to him. Every time he came up with one of his absurd postulations, I responded like I would have to a toddler who was whining about not getting an icecream.

He was -furious-. Called me every kind of name in the book, said that I should at least respect his right to a different opinion, and that his arguments were just as valid as mine. And that if I was unable to have a proper conversation with him about it, then he wasn’t going to bother.

I didn’t even justify that with an answer.

A healthy debate is good. And we don’t have to agree on all the issues or all the details. Not even about a subject as dreadful as the Holocaust. But to deny it ever took place is simply not serious.

And anyone claiming it did not, should not be treated as if they were.

Because today, my good friend Maria is getting married. I can’t be there, since this happens in Denmark, but for those of you who follow my blog, you know I was at the hen party a couple of weeks ago.

Epic stuff.

Maria’s wedding, however, has me thinking about marriage and relationships in general. Obviously, a wedding should be a source of joy and happiness, and fortunately, that is almost always the case. Naturally, there are tragic situations where it is not, but in this, our post-modern Western culture, marriage is not so much a social contract anymore, as it is a symbolic union of love. If you go back a hundred years, or even fifty years in some places, marriage was a different beast altogether, but this is not a history lesson, and I won’t be going into that in any real detail now.

The fact of the matter is that my friend has fallen in love and fortunately, it is a mutual feeling. And that the two happy people are going to “tie the knot”.

So what is this about? It’s simple really.

It’s about readiness.

At one time, I knew a girl who thought in all seriousness, that if she wasn’t married and a mother at LEAST once by the time she was 23, her life would practically be over. She’d be an old maid and she’d be doomed forever to wander the wastelands of solitude (to get a bit pseudo-poetic about it). We all tried to tell her how ludicrous this was, but no amount of persuasion or reasoning could convince her otherwise.

She didn’t marry until earlier this year, and by now, she’s gone past 23 by several years.

I know plenty of other people who will sprout lines such as “I don’t believe in marriage” or similar. Hell, one old and sadly long-lost friend once swore in front of an audience of fifty that she would never get married. It should be said that her boyfriend was in attendance too. Five years later he came home from work one day, gave her a ring and said “do you want to?” and she crumbled and said yes on the spot.

So yes, this is about readiness. About being ready to commit oneself to a lifelong relationship.

Saying “I do” and promising to love, honor and respect the person you’re standing next to at that moment for the rest of your life. But when we make that commitment, we are typically in our twenties, and “the rest of our lives” could … in rare cases, be another eighty years! Do we truly understand what this means at that young age?

Some people do, and others, obviously, do not. I firmly believe Maria knows what it means. She has gone through some of the most traumatic experiences in the past of any person I know, and she knows fully well not to do something like this lightly.

She is not a rarity in this, but it is still thoughtprovoking how many couples find out that marriage means more than simply having a permanent boyfriend or girlfriend, and who subsequently end up divorcing. I think, in many cases, this happens because people don’t fully realize what they are getting into.

I know I didn’t, for one.

Worst mistake of my life.

Not so for people like Maria. Her husband after today, Søren, is a good man. I’ve met him, and I think I am a good judge of character. He gives me the best kind of feeling inside, and I have no doubt that he’d carry his wife on hands and knees through life if that’s what it took. Fortunately, I think they’ll carry each other, more than anything else. And that’s the way it should be.

I have prayed to Vår, this morning, for their wedding. I hope it was heard. But as I sat down by my computer afterwards … because I am the kind of person I am … I thought of some of all the people I’ve met whose marriages didn’t make it. One of my mother’s old friends is now on her husband number four, for example. Whenever people talk of her, I keep thinking of Elizabeth Taylor … who seemed to think of marriage as a lottery and entertainment more than anything else.

When we do something as serious as this, whether it is a secular marriage or a religious one, we need to be certain that we are doing the right thing. Not just for ourselves, but for the other person too. Even for those we call friends. No happy marriage has ever come without certain sacrifices, after all.

This is turning into a rambling rant, I know. But I hope some of you can follow me, anyway. Two days ago was Thanksgiving in the United States. And as old readers of this blog will know, I have celebrated it in Denmark for a few years, with old friends, eating good food and watching football games. We never celebrated the religious part of it, but always did it in the spirit of “It’s good to simply sit down and reflect about what we have to be thankful for in life”. I have been in a reflective kind of mood for a few days because of this, and I guess that’s why I ended up giving this so much thought.

It’s worth stopping once in a while, and reflect on the good things in life. As the great Hans Christian Andersen wrote:

“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower”.

Stop and reflect about the good things in life, and how fortunate we are to have them. It doesn’t hurt, and it may even make you smile.

In the meantime, I’ll be wishing my friend all the best in her future, married life.

Hail Vår.