Following on from my blog post yesterday lauding the #stopbullying and #doitforDolly campaigns my attention has been drawn to the beyond bizarre social media bullying of daughter of the hero of this perfectly harmless and highly amusing good news story from The Land senior journalist Alex Druce. Check it out and decide for yourself. ‘Give me the bloody chicken’: ‘Hero’ dad thwarts chook thief outside Coles .
My source tells me the bullying got so bad the young lady shut down her Facebook page
Quoting nineteenth-century chemist Ellen Swallow Richards
‘The environment that people live in, is the environment they learn to live in, respect and perpetuate.’
I pose the questions.
- Has the Mean Mob Mentality got out of control and if the answer is yes how do we all learn to be nice to each other?
- Has the support system failed our fellow man/woman doing it tough that their only option is to steal food?
- Do we need to rethink the environment we are cultivating with our PhD’s in Judgment and Expertise in everything and anything?
Where I’m coming from is contrarian to many, so please read to the end.
This is not a criticism of what’s happening in general or the posts and comments here.
In grappling with the issue we are faced with in relation to personal attacks in social and mainstream media we need to call out bullying for what it is, and those carrying out that behaviour need to be held to account.
At this time I’m reminded of Sister Teresa of Calcutta.
She was asked to attend an “anti-war” rally, where the proponents would have obviously used her presence to leverage the PR.
Sister Teresa’s response was if you can explain to me what you are for, I’ll consider it.
When we use the word anti-bullying, we are articulating what we don’t want. So in this instance I ask the question … what do we want?
Using Sister Teresa’s framework … if we are anti bullying, what are we for?
The counter position to bullying is lost in the current conversations, which is the opportunity to recognise preferred behaviour.
We know what we don’t want but, have difficulty articulating what we do want.
When training dogs, we reward positive behaviour for the obvious reason, with young children we do the same when it comes to behaviours. Or we should.
So what behaviour do we wish to recognise as it applies to social and mainstream media behaviour?
It’s easy to be against and say no .. more difficult to be for and say yes
May be it’s time we got clear and created a turnaround in the conversation?
Hi Andrew
I am going to blog your comment you make a very important point