Jetta was bullied

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Recently, a story was reported on Fox News that a young lady named Jetta was bullied in school after she had donated her lovely long hair for use for kids with cancer.

The photos that are supplied of young Jetta show a really pretty child of about seven or eight, with beautiful long hair, a photograph of the same young lady having her hair cut, and the after photos, showing her looking very reproachful.

The story is that her classmates (or schoolmates) taunted her for having a boy's haircut.  It all depends, of course, on what the words were that were actually used, but, on the face of it, this sort of bullying (and I agree that it certainly is bullying) is hardly terribly painful.  The biggest crime here seems to be that Fox News chose to make a fuss about the whole thing.

OK, we are in a time where bullying is deplored generally, and publicly.  But it seems more that Fox News is trying to get some attention by featuring this very sweet young lady than that it is trying to focus on bullying in schools.

Is all bullying equally bad?  I don't think all bullying is equally bad, just as I don't think all crimes are equally bad.  Kids are often mean to each other, because they envy whatever the other kid has, and try to be hurtful in retaliation.  Are we ever going to eradicate bullying?  Is the situation going to be helped by parental intervention?

The principal of the school concerned remarked that nobody was ever hurt by a few harsh words, and I believe this is the sanest response he or she could have made.  My goodness; vilifying a bunch of kids for taunting a girl about a short haircut probably falls close to zero in the scale of all bullying.  If anyone wants to pursue a zero tolerance policy for schoolyard bullying, they're going to be seriously disappointed.

Physical bullying must absolutely stop.  But bullying of the sort such as "your haircut is stupid" is stupid, but it is even more stupid to be prosecuting it.  On the other hand, bullying a child because its parents have an alternate lifestyle, or because it is from a minority race, or because it has some birth defect is deplorable, and needs to be looked into.

In the present case, I think an enormous part of the problem is that the utter charm of the young lady concerned is almost impossible to resist!  She is not only pretty, but has a lovely smile, so she makes a wonderfully tempting poster child for bullying generally.  But I think she would be better served by being counseled to turn the other cheek, as the saying goes, than to make any bigger a fuss over the incident than has already been made.

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