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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Fox News's Megyn Kelly states that Jesus (and Santa Claus) were White Men

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The whole concept of race, as exemplified by the question of whether a given person is white (or perhaps I should put that in quotes: "white") is shrouded in vagueness.  Is Megyn Kelly white?  She would probably feel very put upon if we were to conclude that the issue is in doubt, but for people like Ms Kelly, it is desperately important to be classified as white, which is why she is probably such a prominent figure at Fox News.  They need people who see things in black and white, pun intended, and Megyn is cute, and she has a cute name, so, there you go!

It seems to be, without getting too technical, that the label "belonging to the white race" means, today, that someone has a majority of genes inherited from the peoples of Western Europe.  This, unfortunately, excludes the Hebrew peoples, among whom we consider the historical Jesus to have been born.  Israeli people of today, of course, have a significant proportion of European ancestry, courtesy of their protracted exile in Europe.  While Hebrew folks of the Year Dot were probably of at least partly Caucasian ethnicity, they were hardly any more white than Mahmoud Abbas or Benjamin Netanyahu, and it is to Ms Kelly's credit that her concept of whiteness stretches so wide.  Incidentally, Mr Netanyahu probably has more European ancestry than he cares to admit.

I think most rational people, Christian or otherwise, are just as concerned about any attempts to classify Jesus according to American ethnical categories as Megyn Kelly is upset about Jesus being anything but white.  Jesus's color is entirely in the eyes of the beholder, and the Romans of Jesus's time would have seen Jesus as most definitely black, if they were familiar with the concept of color (and they probably were).

From an social-anthropological perspective, the particularly pernicious twist given to the somewhat naive concept of color in the late seventeenth century in England and Western Europe, and elevated to almost maniacal heights in some parts of the US, almost certainly served as a justification of slavery, especially among Christian intellectuals, who may have been secretly troubled by the morals of the practice.  In any case, the convenience of racism was eagerly embraced by people of lesser intellectual capacity, so much so that it became part and parcel of their self-esteem.  Today, a century removed from the economic necessity of the fiction of racial differences, the concept of race is still a major part of the concept-world of many influential people, such as Megyn Kelly, evidently, who appear to use race as one of the ways they use to explain the world to themselves and each other.  Ms Kelly was at pains to emphasize to young people in her audience that, in fact, both Santa Claus and Jesus were white men.  What does that mean?  Perhaps it means that, despite the fact that our President is black, and seems to be accomplishing a lot more than all the white presidents who preceded him, we still have white people to be proud of?  This appears to give us a rather dismal glimpse into what goes on inside Megyn Kelly's confused head!

Let me repeat to anyone who is still confused: White people have nothing to be ashamed of.  Failures of white folks and successes of black folks have less to do with their race than with their individual motivations, their personal histories and circumstances, and their upbringing and education.  Any mental adjusting Megyn Kelly accomplishes is not likely to be very useful to most members of US society.