In Continuum.

Jaheem Herrera is an ordinary eleven year old boy from Atlanta, Georgia. He doesn't look very different from his peers, at least not from the picture of him that I saw on CNN's front page. In the picture, Jaheem is smiling at the camera, just a slight curve at the edge of his mouth, as if he was smirking at the cameraman, whoever he was. On April the 16th, Jaheem was reluctant to go to school, and had very little appetite for breakfast. Yet, like any other parents would do, his parents told him to go to school and get the day over and done with. So Jaheem went to school that day, just like any other day, and came home in one piece at the end of it all. He seemed normal at first glance, happy that his report card showed all As and Bs. His parents were satisfied, and Jaheem took looked like he was happy about his own grades. After a high five with his mother, Jaheem retreated into his bedroom to wait for dinner to be served. When that eventually came around the corner in the evening, his younger sister called for him to come down for the meal - no answer. That was when the family went upstairs to find that Jaheem has hung himself inside his closet with a belt around his neck.

That is the story I read about from CNN's front page the other day, and felt very strongly about. There are things in the news you see, things happening to people all around the world, and you know that half of those is due to stupidity for the most part. People making stupid decisions, people getting themselves into stupid situations, and all that stuff. One of the latent function of the news seems to be desensitizing people to news and images, the ones that'd otherwise affect us deeply if we had not been exposed to it on a daily basis. In the local context, it almost seems like the most horrific crime to dump a baby in a rubbish chute after an unplanned pregnancy. It sounds horrible, but then we've heard it all before. Every year, you hear about news like that in the evening paper, about how the body of yet another baby has been found in a rubbish dump somewhere in Singapore. It is sad, but then you flip to the next page of the evening paper and you check out what your favorite celebrity wore for an award show that happened last night. It seems to be this bite-size mentality that we have these days, when we need information to come to us quickly and summarized. As a result, our responses - the emotional ones - to these bite-size information are also relatively quick and summarized, so to speak. In short, we tend not to feel very much, anymore.

Once in a while, you come across a piece of news that makes you think about things, you know, and you become affected by it. No matter how roughened up our skin may be, there will always be a needle sharp enough to penetrate you somehow. It doesn't take a lot at times, but for me it took the death of an eleven year old boy to realize that there are some news that still matter to me, somehow. The reason why eleven year old Jaheem decided to end his life in such a horrific way is because of bullying in school, something which a lot of people his age experience. I wasn't necessarily bullied in school until a little later on, and high school was particularly unkind to me for a period of time. A lot of students would tell you that they have experienced bullying in some form when they were back in school, and it is such a common thing in truth. Bullying happens a lot, whether or not you are in the top-tier school or some neighborhood school. You are bound to hear about, or experience bullying, one way or another. It is common within the compounds of the school, but you don't really hear people speaking up about it, or openly condemning it at all. Throughout my education life, I don't think anybody from school has actually made a big deal out of students being bullied. It's one of those "it happens" things, like forgetting to bring your lunchbox or something.

As much as I think it is a common thing to be bullied at school, people do not realize that just because it is common, it is not necessarily right. Some people would probably tell you that being bullied at school is a part of growing up, and I guess there is some truth in that. Like, it always begins with being pushed around before you start to stand up for yourself. By doing that, you grow and you learn, and you know never to take shit from anybody, anymore. But it is like pills you get from doctors you know, you prescribe a certain medication to a certain person, and it may work differently on somebody else out there. Perhaps the other person could experience an allergic reaction because he is allergic or something. You don't throw the same brand of bullying to all the little boys and little girls from school and expect them to turn out the same way as you did. You don't expect all the children to take bullying the same way as you do, because we are all individual units that work in different ways. It could work for you, but it may not work for others who go through the same thing. You cannot assume that what worked for you in the past will work for your children, because they are ultimately still different from you.

I came out of high school being weary of bullying. It didn't last the full four years of course, but there was a period of time, like Jaheem, I didn't want to go to school. I was tired of the pranks and the 'games', the things that my classmates would say about me whenever I stepped into the class. Not everybody was like that, and we are really just talking about a few bad apples. Still, they were enough to traumatize me for the most part, and made me not want to go to school for reasons I never got around to tell the parents. It felt almost shameful, to tell you the truth, if I were to tell them about it. As if I could fend for myself, as if I needed them to deal with every problem that I had at school. So I didn't tell them for the most part, and eventually I learned to fight back. When my brand new art class pens were stolen from my pencil case, what I did was to steal from everybody else whom I suspected to have done it. I went around the class one day during recess and stole from all those people who have done me wrong before, and I made sure that I stole only the good pens, never the cheap ones from the school bookshop. That was how I fought back, seldom with fists, but always a tooth for a tooth. I stood up for myself, and eventually gained the respect of the bullies who made life horrible for me. Still, I believe that not every child can come out from it completely unscathed, not every child can learn about how to stand up for himself when it happens.

I feel very strongly about bullying at school, because I have experienced it first hand myself. I fought back, but that doesn't mean every child would. Back in those days, it was all about surviving from one day to another, and you were either the prey or the predator. When the attention on me was shifted to someone else, I stayed out from the center of attention. I never participated in the bullying, but that doesn't mean that I did anything to stop it either. Classmates of mine were badly bullied, some of them even humiliated in front of the whole class, considering the fact that I was in an all-boys school. Things were really horrible for those individuals, and I have no idea how they got out of it unscathed and unharmed. That was how the people classified others anyway: either you were with us or you were against us. I was never with them, but I was never against them either. If it gave me lesser attention, then I'd play along with the rules. Those were the rules, and everybody else that didn't abide to those rules were bullied while the teachers were away. They probably never told anybody about it, not even today, about how they were bullied. Whatever happened in the classrooms stayed in the classrooms, and they were afraid to tell anybody.

I don't remember anybody from school, the higher authorities anyway, ever making any kind of open statement to condemn such a thing. Of course, when caught bullying your peer by the discipline master, you are going to get the kind of punishment that you deserve. Yet, those minor punishments were never a cure, and they only made things worse for the victims of these bullying, you know. The bullies would want to find a way to get back at you because you got them into trouble in the first place. So the next time they come down on you, they are going to come down on you harder than before. It is a vicious cycle, because telling somebody is only going to make things worse. I don't think there is a measure in our education system to prevent such a thing from happening, you know. I don't think anybody out there has a measure as to what we should do to the school bullies and the victims. Sure, they put a school counsellor in the corner of the school and tells the students about him. Yet, how many students actually go to this school counsellor to ask for his advice on things anyway. Schools are not making it clear as to what punishments should be given to these bullies, and the kind of emotional trauma that should be addressed in the victims of such crimes.

We almost always only pay attention when somebody finally gets pushed over the edge, some kid hangs himself by a belt in his closet. We wait till somebody gets hurt before we start doing anything about it. However, if you think about it, when was the last time anything the schools did made a difference anyway. School bullies are always going to exist, and they are always going to make someone's school life a living hell. That is the reality of things in the schoolyard, though it is something that nobody wants to admit. You want your children to go to school and come back home, all safe and sound. You trust that the school environment is going to be conducive enough for educational purposes, and no child should have to go through any forms of bullying or hazing, or whatever you decide to call it. To me, it is the most horrible thing that could happen to a child at school, to be afraid and even terrified of the people around him. You never know what is going to happen, and you are always going to live in fear somehow. The schools don't do anything about it, they just wait until someone kills him or herself, then they make some kind of statement at school. At the end of the day, nothing is done, and the bullies remain scott-free.

I guess I'd just like to say that bullying is such a horrible thing to do to another human being, you know. Whether or not it is in school, or a new form of bullying called "cyber-bullying". Bullying, by itself, can be such a scarring thing to anybody. You will never know the effects until it has been accumulated so much one day that someone eventually breaks and crumbles from it. I think while you should teach your child to never take shit from anybody, you should also tell him the nature of bullies from school. The truth is that bullies bully because they are jealous or that they are afraid. Bullies bully because you are, in some ways, different from them. As a result, they put labels on you and they make fun of you because you are different, when in truth being different isn't being wrong. What you have to believe in is that you have to remain true to yourself, and never allow others to walk all over you. Violence may not always be the answer to things in life, but fight back if you must. Seek help, do something about it, because keeping quiet is never going to be the way out. Nobody is going to know if you are going to complain to yourself. Somebody out there can do something, somebody out there can help. If your fists can only reach that far, seek help - before it is too late. Don't be the next little Jaheem, because those bullies are not worth taking your life for.