 |
| It still hurts after all these years |
Speaking at the ‘White House Conference on Bullying Prevention’ this week, President Barack Hussein Obama, D-Kenya, said that as a child he was bullied for his ‘big ears’ and his unusual name.
He states that he ‘didn’t emerge unscathed’ from the torment, and stressed that ‘bullying is not a rite of passage for youth, but a practice that can have destructive consequences’.
He tells about how he was mercilessly teased about how "he needed a mop instead of a Q-tip to clean his ears." And about the time he had an ear infection, and one of his classmates said "it took a 55 gallon drum of penicillin to clear it up."
When he was four years old, his mother took him to see the Disney Movie "Dumbo."
After the film, the other children all asked him for his autograph.
Many years later, when he was a teenager, he had his ears pierced, and they charged him double due to his ears being so large.
The White House conference has shockingly found that over one third of school aged children have experienced bullying, and an estimated 160,000 students stayed home from school yesterday, for fear of being bullied.
These alarming statistics highlight just how important proactive change about bulling, both in school and online, is. Hopefully, at the conclusion of this conference, we will have some more definite practices in place to stop the trend.
Growing up, everyone is always told that school doesn’t last forever, and no one should take notice of the bullies, because when you leave school they don’t matter anymore.
If president Obama, clearly a self assured, confident human being, as he is the leader of this nation, and is known throughout the whole world, can still feel the sting of bullying, how is a 10 year old child supposed to just brush it off?
No comments:
Post a Comment