Aliyah Baskind

           America is built on people fighting to make their lives better.  Women, colored people, people of different religions and social classes have fought and given their lives so that they could obtain the lives that they deserved, and we would not be here today without their relentless dedication.  They believed we could do better, and they were right.  In one way or another, bullying has always been a part of American history.  Putting others down, degrading them for being different, and sheer prejudice for things that are out of their control is an unfortunate habit in American politics, media, and the lives of everyday citizens of all ages. 

            One of the most popular examples of bullying is in the school system.  Every day, students are tormented and made to believe they are the worthless and don’t deserve to be loved and happy.  Bully (2011), a recent documentary has provided a serious insight into the lives of several children across America who are perfect examples, and shows that things are far worse than most would expect.  One featured subject is Alex Libby, a middle school student from Oklahoma who is a victim of verbal and physical abuse from his classmates.  His peers call him names such as “Fish Face”, and repeatedly tell him that he is worthless and disgusting.  One of the most popular clips from the movie is footage from Alex’s bus rides to and from school where the other children bang his head against the seats, sit on him, punch him, and stab him, among other things.  They also tell him that they will bring weapons to school and kill him and his family.  The abuse against Alex is so severe that his younger siblings receive hate merely for being related to him.  When his parents are notified of the severity of his issues, they ask him why he tolerates it, and Alex responds that they are his friends, and they are “Just joking around”.  After his mother tells him that these children are not his friends, and that friends don’t hurt eachother, he asks, “If they’re not my friends, what friends do I have?”  This response is fairly common among children who are experiencing bullying, as if to say that negative attention is better than no attention at all.  When the school faculty was addressed, they did nothing about it, saying that the kids on Alex’s bus were “Good as gold,” and ignored the problem altogether.   To cope with the constant abuse, Alex would smile and pretend that what they are saying is a joke, only making the emotional/mental abuse sink in deeper and cause more trauma, whether he realized it or not.  When asked how he feels when his peers are putting him down and hurting him, he said, “It makes me want to be the bully.”

Another child that is showcased is Kelby Johnson, a transgendered (female-to-male) middle school student from Alabama who is completely isolated for being gay.  When Kelby came out, the entire community shunned her and her family.  People who had previously been close to her family instantly cut off all communication and treated them as if they were aliens.  In the documentary, Kelby talks about how she has been totally pulled apart by not only her classmates, but the teachers and faculty as well.  She describes an instance when her teacher was attempting to gather the students’ attention and said, “Boys, girls, and Kelby.”  She also shares a story about a time when she was crossing a street when a car was coming, and the car sped up and hit her on purpose.  She hit the car’s windshield and fell off, and the car sped away.  Her family, who had been very conservative prior to finding out their daughter was gay, completely turned around on their stance towards gay rights.  They offered her any help they could offer, even telling her that they could move and go somewhere bigger and better, to which she declined and said, “If I leave, they win.”  Eventually, Kelby and her family moved to a different city where she earned her GED.  The third student being followed is Ja’Maya, a middle school student who attempted to take matters into her own hands. 

After being constantly tormented on the school bus for being tall and skinny, Ja’Maya took her mother’s gun and pointed it at her peers on the bus one morning.  She did not hurt anyone, but she was immediately detained and faced with charges such as 22 counts of kidnapping, one for each child on the bus.  School officials turned all of the blame on her, disregarding that the cause of her breakdown was constant verbal abuse by her peers on the bus.  They said that unless they were physically hurting her, she had no right to stand up for herself and attempt self-defense.  Even if bringing a gun may seem like Ja’Maya overreacted, they failed to find the source of the problem and address it, which will ultimately not solve anything, and more children will continue to bully and be bullied. Eventually the charges against her were dropped, but Ja’Maya still had to spend months in a psychiatric hospital, as she was deemed “Mentally Unstable”.  This is an example of an extremely common occurrence in bullying cases, where the victim is often seen as the one with the problem and the actual source is victimized and let off with little-to-no punishment, solving nothing and only making the problem worse.  If American schools continue with this type of behavior, more and more students will be abused and be driven to drop out of school, become a bully themselves, hurt themselves, and in some cases which are also described in the film, commit suicide. 

            “To This Day”, a poem by Shane Koyczan set to the video provided below, addresses how effects from bullying that are inflicted at a young age carry through to adulthood, and will have an eternal impact on how the victim sees themselves and the people around them.  The poem begins with an anecdote about him when he was younger and how childhood nicknames have stuck with him.  For instance, after being called “Pork chop” in school, he refuses to eat pork chops now as an adult.  He follows by describing a friend he had in school who was bullied as well, but for different reasons.  She had a birthmark on her face that made her the subject of torment by her peers.  They would leave signs on her desk that said, “Beware of Dog”.  Koyczan continues by updating the audience on this girl’s adult life.  He says that even though she has a loving husband and children that think she is beautiful, she doesn’t see it, and she will always feel insecure about her appearance because of the way she was treated in school.  Another boy he describes was adopted at a young age and suffers from severe depression. Koyczan tells the audience about how this boy started therapy in the 8^th grade and “Had a personality made up of tests and pills,” and when he attempted suicide, he was told to “get over it”.  Koyczan finishes these stories by saying that cases such as these are not at all uncommon.  He tears apart the popular saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” saying that it is unacceptable to believe that being made to think that no one would ever love you hurts less than a broken bone, as if depression is something you can fix or just get over.  He claims that there is always something beautiful in yourself, even if you can’t see it, and that you have to believe that the people who always treated you as though you were not worth an ounce of love were wrong.  He closes the poem by saying, “Our lives will always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain, and more to do with beauty.”  By saying this, Koyczan addresses what many believe to be  the core problem in society and the ultimate source of bullying, that society cares more about outward beauty than anything else, and it is because of this that they don’t understand what people like these are going through.  If more people cared about what others are enduring, rather than the quality of their clothing, skin, hair, etc., perhaps we would not have as big of an issue with bullying and depression/suicide.

 This poem relates to the “Bully” documentary because it discusses the immense issue of bullying and abuse in American schools and gives specific cases of victims and their struggles.  The difference between these texts is that this poem addresses the long-term effects of childhood bullying by following certain subjects into adulthood and describing how the insecurity that is inflicted upon them at a young age does not just go away.   Bully and “To This Day” go hand-in-hand, as they both address the short-term and long-term effects of abuse, which is something that can easily be forgotten in the argument against bullying.

            The song “Dear Mr. President” by Pink discusses (and attacks) the former President, George W. Bush, and Vice President, Dick Cheney.  It focuses on their choices when it comes to the military, gay rights, poverty, and general political hot topics.  Pink begins the song by saying, “Dear Mr. President, come take a walk with me, let’s pretend we’re just two people and you’re not better than me. I’d like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly.”  This opening line is meant to seem calm, but at the same time very firm and direct.  The listener is able to tell from the beginning that this song is openly directed at a specific person and will be powerful and opinionated.  She first addresses poverty by saying, “How do you feel when you see all the homeless on the street?  Who do you pray for at night before you go to sleep? What do you feel when you look in the mirror?”  Here, Pink is attempting to address a serious problem, while at the same time turning it into a personal attack, discretely claiming that Bush has done nothing for the poor, and asking how he can possibly be content with himself as the leader of the country.  She then brings up issues with the military, saying, “How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?  How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye?”, mainly focusing on the fact that our soldiers were gone for far too long and that countless deaths could have been avoided if he had sent them home when necessary.  She purposefully brings up families in hopes to make her point more effective by targeting the pathos, or emotional aspect, of the audience.  Pink also strategically put that line in the chorus, which means that by repeating it, she is hoping to make the audience think about it more and be more likely to react.  The song then attempts to have a “conversation” with the former President, asking if he was/is lonely, and accusing him of underestimating the American citizens’ intelligence when it comes to political affairs, “How can you say no child is left behind?  We’re not dumb and we’re not blind.”  Pink then takes a small part of the song to personally attack Dick Cheney and his familial affairs by saying, “What kind of father would take his own daughter’s rights away?  What kind of father would hate his own daughter if she were gay?” She is referring to when Cheney continued to be staunchly homophobic and speak out against gay rights, even though his daughter had come out as a lesbian.  She follows by going back to Bush and saying, “You’ve come a long way from whiskey and cocaine.”  By discussing their personal lives, Pink is hoping to reach out to Bush and Cheney and make them feel remorse for their actions, and perhaps change their point of view.  The refrain of the song suddenly turns very aggressive and loud, and Pink is screaming, “Let me tell you about hard work, minimum wage with a baby on the way… rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away… building a bed out of a cardboard box… you don’t know nothing about hard work,” and completely tears him down personally and professionally.  She closes with, “You’d never take a walk with me, would you?”  With these lyrics, Pink is attempting to affect George Bush and Dick Cheney on a personal level, as well as a political level by discussing their home lives, how they handle family “problems”, and by stating factual evidence on American political affairs such as “No Child Left Behind”, war, and poverty.  The issues that Pink discusses in “Dear Mr. President” reflect on what can be considered bullying on the American population.  She is, in a way, saying that by ignoring severe problems, assuming that Americans will not understand political affairs, and treating some citizens with more respect than others, Bush and Cheney were bullying and abusing the country that they were supposed to be making better.  

            Political figures and celebrities are crucial causes in bullying altogether, even though children and their parents may not realize it.  Anyone who watches television and movies, passes by a magazine in the grocery store, or is around people who are interested in the media in any way is exposed to the lives of celebrities.  This may not be a negative thing in some cases, but for most of the time, the media only advertises/publishes negative happenings in the lives of young starlets.  It isn’t difficult to find a magazine cover that features someone with a drug addiction, or another person cheating on their significant other.  One could easily log onto the internet and, without even looking for it, find an article bashing a celebrity’s choice of outfit to go to the mall.  It’s easy to look at the lives of famous people and outwardly judge them, but doing so teaches us, especially our children, that it is acceptable to put down others.  Regardless of whether or not we choose to accept it, we are surrounded by bullying in some form and stopping bullying means we have to not only focus on our schools, but also the media that consumes, and will continue to consume, our lives and our thought processes.

 This song relates to the documentary Bully because it is addressing bullying, albeit in a roundabout way.  The song is crying out that America could do better and that change needed to happen immediately, just as it was discussed in the film.  The song also relates to the “To This Day” poem by Shane Koyczan because it gives the audience the feeling of having or witnessing a conversation with the author.  In “To This Day”, Koyczan is speaking directly to the listener or someone who has been bullied and is telling them that life can get better if you want it to.  In “Dear Mr. President”, Pink is having a conversation with George Bush and Dick Cheney, saying that life for Americans can get better, but only if they change their ways and really work for improvement. 

All three of these examples of modern-day bullying are striking and powerful in their own way, and are connected even if they are expressed through different outlets.  They represent a generation of Americans who are witnessing unacceptable abuse and are willing to stand up and do their part to change it.  I strongly believe that with the help of these artists, along with everyone else who has experienced it in any way or place, bullying will eventually become another example of how America fought for change where they knew it was desperately needed.  Pink, Shane Koyczan, and the makers of “Bully” know that America can do better, and they are absolutely right.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Lee, dir. Bully . 2011. Film. 21 Mar 2013.

Koyczan, Shane, writ. "To This Day". 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2013.

Pink, perf. Pink- Dear Mr. President- Live. 2006. Web. 21 Mar 2013.