Flutterby™! : walk

Copied over from Facebook for posterity.

I've seen a number of the "walk up, not out" hashtag things referenced, and I'd like to take a little trip down memory lane.

In grade school, through high school, I was kind of a runt. Picked on and bullied a lot. Those of us who were outcast-ish tended to stick together, so, yes, I knew the people in high school who had Ruger 223s, and who'd done the appropriate hand-filing to make them fully automatic. I didn't go shooting with them because I had a sense of gun safety and I heard too many tales of accidental discharges to think that was a good idea, but come the Columbine shootings I thought "oh, yeah, those are my peeps and I know exactly which of my high school friends would have most likely been them".

Later in high school I discovered the print shop, which gave me some friends who were ... not of my socioeconomic class, and who were also more of the in crowd.

I forget why there was some protracted time out in front of the high school one day, but I was standing out there, and someone decided to threaten me with a knife. Two friends from print shop decided to casually put themselves in between the guy with the knife and me.

Someone else had seen the uncomfortable dynamic in the crowd and alerted an adult, and the school psychologist came over, completely misreading the situation, grabbed my two friends and threw them up against the wall.

You see, the problem wasn't the kids. The problem was that the bullies were working within the framework that the adults had set up and were maintaining. The bullies were just emulating the behavior they saw from the adult world around them.

There was a bright spot: At some point in my high school years we got a hip young principal in. I was skeptical, but it turned out he was somewhat for real...

Some months later, I had ridden my bicycle to school, came out to find that someone had completely kicked in my wheels. Just destroyed them. So I was out there trying to figure out what I was going to do, and he came by, and we exchanged a few words. In those words it became clear that we both knew exactly who the ringleader of the group that had destroyed my wheels was, that we didn't have any proof of who actually did the damage, and as we parted he asked me to, if I came up with such proof, tell him first rather than seeking revenge myself.

It was too late in my high school experience to make much of a difference, but all of a sudden there was an adult at the school who understood that there was violence boiling just under the surface at this high school in a relatively upscale area of suburban Connecticut, and who was an ally.

The school was Newtown High School. Newtown later became famous for ... well ... violence in schools.

I don't care what your stance on gun control or semi-automatic rifles with pseudo- mililtary stylings or whatever is, but please don't preach "walk up, not out" to kids: It's the adults who need to change to stop the bullying.

Blaming the victims of the system that the adults have created isn't gonna solve the problem.