Is it right to bully another human being, be it physically or emotionally? The answer that comes to your mind should always be an irrefutable ‘no’. Yet, this answer does not always come to the minds of everyone; thus, bullies arise. Rather than using the Golden Rule of treating others the way they want to be treated, bullies choose to do the opposite. As Benjamin Franklin said in his story, The Handsome and Deformed Leg, “There are two Sorts of People in the World, who with equal Degrees of Health, Wealth, and the other Comforts of Life, become, the one happy, and the other miserable”.
Bullies are almost always the latter – miserable beings.
Bullies are like a disease that, if left untreated, will spread and leave its poor victims feeling blue; and, we cannot allow this treatment to occur. Bullying, while not necessarily the biggest problem in our school, is most definitely a problem and is prevalent in every school to some extent.
A statistic from bullyingstatistics.org states that 77 percent of students in the United States of America from grades sixth to tenth have experienced some form of verbal or physical bullying. Furthermore, in 85 percent of those cases, no effort is made by teachers or other students to stop the bullying from taking place. Why do you think that is? To quote from Patrick Henry’s Speech to The Virginia Convention, “We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts”.
In other words, people are willing to ignore something that is important just because it’s unpleasant.
This is simply an unacceptable way of going about things. One cannot expect a situation to improve if they themselves aren’t willing to improve it. We, as a student body, must work with each other to ensure that we can make our school a safe place for everyone; for, if we don’t all stand together, then we will all fall apart. No student should have to come to our school fearing that they will have to face a day of insults or unnecessary sadness. A principle that our country was founded on is the fact that everyone is and deserves to be treated equally, as stated in our Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson stated that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”. I believe wholeheartedly that we each have a responsibility to uphold that principle.
The Emotional and Physical Aspects of Bullying. (2022, Sep 30). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/the-emotional-and-physical-aspects-of-bullying/