Journey

“Giving is the essence of religious life: giving space in one’s life and home, giving a welcome, giving forgiveness, giving love, even giving one’s life. Don’t save. Don’t store up ‘treasure which moth and rust attack.’ Live by the rule of giving.”

- Dorothy Day

(First published in http://a-pinoy-in-nz.blogspot.com/ on Dec 11, 2006 by Ka Uro)

Bullying is when someone, (could be one person or a group of persons) repeatedly does some mean things on another person in order to have power over that person. These could be by saying or writing nasty things about them, harassing them, threatening them, hitting them, not talking to them, stealing from them, damaging their properties, making fun of them, humiliating them, spreading lies about them.

I remember during my high school days (many decades ago!) bullying wasn’t that vicious. A lot of the things we did, we did mostly as a joke to make others laugh. It was normal for us to call each other names like “doro” (laki kasi mata), “barag” (mukhang lizard), “kokak” (mukhang palaka), “baluga” (maitim kasi), “Tange” (look alike nung comedian na si Tange), “bagsik” (mabagsik kasi ang B.O.).

I think the meanest thing, a group of my classmates did back then, was to steal the sandwich baon of one classmate. These group of mischievous juveniles would slip out of class before recess and ransack the bag of another classmate and eat his baon. They kept doing it for days. Until finally, this classmate whose sandwiches were being stolen decided to put some “flavoring” in his sandwiches. He put in some “butiki droppings”. Only then that these group stopped harassing the poor guy.

Talking to my daughter lately, I’ve realized bullying nowadays like most things have gone high-tech. People now stopped passing pieces of paper containing nasty messages about someone else. Instead they leave nasty TXT messages or leave malicious remarks on the website of the person they’re attacking.

Also just recently I came to realize that bullying is not only among students. In fact a most likely victim of bullying nowadays is a teacher. Especially if the teacher comes from a different cultural background, has a thick Asian accent or has difficulty with the English language. Students can be so mean to a teacher without realizing that they are already bullying the teacher.

I felt sorry for one of my daughter’s teachers who my daughter said was really a good teacher. What happened is that a group of pupils, acting like spoiled brats, were often disruptive, disrespectful, and made fun of the teacher’s Hongkong accent.

The poor teacher eventually quit his job and decided to go back to HK; never to teach children anymore. It’s sad when one’s vocation, especially that of being an educator to the youth gets stifled for no good reason. A casualty to a despicable social behaviour we should all do without.