Bystanders...

This past weekend, I co-facilitated a Teachers of Peace workshop in southwest Ohio through Wilmington College. In Ohio, "anti-bullying" is a big thing in the schools, and so it was big in the teachers' minds this weekend. What emerged as a topic was not the bully and the victim, but the bystander. Martin Luther King said "the world begins to end when we are silent on the things that matter". Throughout the course of the discussion, what was interesting to me was to observe how easy it is for all of us to fall into the role of bystander: the teacher who sees in her gym class when students are overly aggressive to the "soft" (meaning gay?) students, and only gives a warning; the teacher who shops at Wal-Mart despite knowing their gender, race, and overall employee bullying tactics; and for me to see the four college students walk right by and look at the woman in DC who was getting ready to jump off a bridge down to a freeway (others of us intervened).

What leads to some of this? Paralysis is part of it; uncertainty of what we can do (such as in the case of the aggressive behavior in the gym); and self-preservation as in the Wal-Mart case (many people shop at Wal-Mart because of the affordability of the products).

At the other end of the spectrum, however, there is the issue of over-reacting in a way that causes more harm than good. To startle the person about to jump may cause him/her to lose balance; to overtly punish and shame the aggressive gym student may simply drive the behavior further underground; and to simply stop shopping at Wal-Mart will do little unless it is done in mass numbers.

So what can we do? Well, what we talked about in the workshop was to put things into a time continuum, and ask the question "where would we like things to be in 5 or 10 years? what can we do now to move things in that direction?" Ultimately we can "speak truth" and bear witness with patience and perseverance. The Wal-Mart shopper can write letters to the editor about unjust practices, or take offensive/mean-spirited t-shirts off the shelves and to the manager to complain about them; the gym teacher can start to track the behavior in the gym, and ask other teachers to do the same outside the gym class, and then take it to the administrator.

The challenge is that we live in a world of polarity - all or nothing. Often we respond to bullying behavior in all its culturally nuanced ways with a bullying response. That's the problem with "anti-" anything; it's about "combating" something which just brings more combat. The real work is to prevent the condition - something that takes a long time, but something we can move towards every day with patience and perseverance.