Helpless

I'm glad that I don't have to grow up again. There seems to be less patience in the world than there was back when life was a bit slower. No microwave ovens, no cellphones or even touchpad phones, no calculators, no transistor radios or color televisions capable of drawing in signals from over 200 channels, no computers, no souped up cars or superhighways, no instant photography or information saving devices, no scanners of any type, no email or internet... how did we get along with all these conveniences that make our life faster? We cooked on the stovetop and in the oven, cranked or turned the telephone dial and waited for the operator, and had to do it at home or from a public pay phone. We used paper and pencil, perhaps a sliderule, our fingers and toes, and our own brains to do the math. We listened to crackly AM stations for news and music on the one radio in the kitchen. The one television that we were lucky to have weighed more than my father, had a viewing screen the size of a dinner plate, and took five or six minutes to warm up its tubes before we could watch the only two channels it could receive during a 16 hour time slot each day. The library or our own set of encyclopedias, or even someone older and wiser were the sources of information for our research. Perhaps we read the daily paper if we were well enough off to afford that luxury, or we listened to the evening news. Cars were big, heavy, and safe but they moved slowly along the surface roads and occasionally the state highways, and it took a while to get anywhere. Rolls of film, mostly black and white, were sent away through the drug store to be developed and printed, and we'd anxiously wait the week or so that the process took to see our priceless photographs, carefully putting them into albums and preserving the negatives in case we wanted more prints. Information we saved on paper or in our heads. We knew what the police were doing when someone overheard a conversation or was there and passed along the news by word of mouth or, if the story were big enough, by phone call or radio. Store clerks had to go look at lists to discover prices if they didn't know them. Baggage carried hand-written tags. We hand wrote cards, letters, thank you notes, applications and requests, addressed the envelopes, licked and applied the stamps, trusted them to the post office, and waited days for the messages to get to their destinations.

This isn't a complaint but more of an observation about the path that life in our society has traveled in the past 50 or 60 years. I'm glad to be part of a generation that's lived in both worlds, the slower and more deliberate, and the faster and more convenient. Still, there are some dilemmas that remain.

One such dilemma is how someone can determine the line between being a tattletale and getting into trouble for standing up to a bully. Adults have to make those decisions, but their life experience and savvy usually help them to decide the best plan of action at the time. Kids, on the other hand, usually have a tougher time.

Take the case of the kid who likes to taunt and belittle others, also called using verbal abuse. It can make my hands itch to slap the perpetrator, but then that person is so damaged already with his need to diminish and torture people more vulnerable than he that it's certainly not going to do any good, so I refrain. But I'm the adult. What about the victim? Or the victim's friend? What are their choices? "Turn the other cheek" works only for a while because the bully often raises the ante with more vicious words or by physical approach, but rarely crossing the line with touch. Telling an adult brands the victim as a tattletale, adding to his already perceived weakness. Telling the bully to stop only works in the opposite, urging him on because, clearly, his goal is being reached, and he wants more fulfillment. Friends stepping in can be of help in going to an adult as a group or just being physically present to display a larger support which can disable the bully at least temporarily, but he'll usually come back. However, sometimes a single friend's actions can simply inflame the perpetrator, and if the friend feels strongly enough to address the bully himself, verbally or even physically with a hand, a shove, or something more, then the waters become terribly muddy. Then it can become two against one, in the bully's version, and of course the two will testify against the one. How can the full and accurate view of the situation be made clear? Often, it can't.

I have no answers for this problem. I saw it happen as a child, and I still see it happening among children of high school age or even older. I will say that part of kidlife is to do and learn things on your own, hiding some of the activities and knowledge from your parents as you separate from them, but there are some things that kids need to share with adults because kids aren't yet ready to cope with them all. How to determine what to share and when? That's a tough thing to teach, and at times I feel quite helpless about knowing how to do it.