While it is true that we can do both, Walk up and Walk out,
walking up could do unintended damage to certain types of students. Not all loners are lonely. Some introverts prefer to bask in their solitude
and don’t like self-inviting extraverts to intrude on their solace with the
assumption that everyone likes company.
It’s better to first check if that person wants to be approached, rather
than interrupt their contemplation on the multiverse with questions like, “Did
you see that episode of the Walking Dead?”
Ask first if they are busy.
Walking up would not have worked on previous school shooters
like Cho Seung Hui and Adam Lanza. Cho
could hardly talk, and at Virginia Tech, he rejected people trying to socialize
with him. Lanza had Sensory Integration
Disorder, and also scarcely spoke. A
very patient high school teacher tried to warm up to Lanza, sitting next to him
in Tech Club by taking a gradual, non-forceful approach to socializing. It did not make the future school shooter
into a kinder soul.
Instead of forcing ourselves to fake kindness, we should
learn to abstain from emotional cruelty.
If you don’t need to say something rude, you don’t have to. A bully may want to be mean, but there is no need.
Cruelty is one less thing to do.
We need to learn to back off, and use school for its intended purpose –
to learn. Likewise, we need to go to
work for its intended purpose – to do our jobs.
If we focus, we can achieve. If
we harm, we are taking away someone’s focus from their goals, and doing the
same to ourselves.
I remember in class that Thomas Hobbes believed we were nice
out of fear. In the late 1500s-early
1600s, murder was harder to solve before forensic technology developed. People had to be nice or else the recipient
could commit murder and get away with it.
Now that we have DNA fingerprinting and a plethora of methods for
investigating homicide, people are free to be verbally sadistic without fear of
murder until a rising trend of massacres.
Mass murderers are willing to die for their crimes. Infamy may be damning, but it can be
immortalizing.
It says something about our society if we need guns pointed
at us to improve our moral character. We
don’t need to pretend to be nice to prevent atrocities. The pretentiousness is emotionally
dishonest. We need to stop laughing and
start thinking, meaning stop laughing at others and start thinking of others. We need to back off and stop angering people
to the point of wanting to shoot us. Yet
some people will be incensed by anything, so let’s take away their military
weapons, because a school is not supposed to be a war zone.
©2018 Caroline Friehs
Originally posted on March 21, 2018
References:
Friehs, C (2015).
Bullying is Russian Roulette with the Student Body – Examining the
Precursors to Five School Shootings in America.
Publication: September 30, 2015;
Amazon KDP. Available from: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015Z9FNFC?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Gill, J.H. & Rader, M (1995). The Enduring Questions – Traditional and
Contemporary Voices. 6th Ed. Publisher:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
6277 Sea Harbor Drive Orlando,
FL 32887-6777. [Ch.22, p.495].
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014 Feb 25). Hobbes Moral and Political Philosophy. [Point 6].
Retrieved from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/
Header photo: Credited from the associated press of FullAct.com.
