"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
People change, certainly from the time they are kids. But to what degree? The recent suicide of a 12 year-old boy due to bullying made me think: who are these bullies going to grow up to become? How are they going to live with themselves?
Is anyone I have known as an adult a childhood bully?
I am certain that I did not witness the more awful forms of bullying (not that that excuses the behavior or makes the bullied person's life any easier). But I have seen bullying. I have been a friend to someone who was bullied, and I've told the boys who were bullying her to back off. But I have also failed to extend an invitation to a girl that some of the other girls didn't like. I've failed to speak up when people were saying something mean about a classmate who was persistently excluded. I was never a bully. But I didn't stop bullying or similar acts every time I saw them. I didn't because it wasn't like I never did and, as a kid who didn't know any better, I thought somehow that made my lack of action excusable.
