*tapping the monitor with a water bottle in celebratory imitation of a toast*
Yes. What I remember most about that night was the feeling of "say WHAT? No. That can't be happening. It isn't possible."
I just barely remember the wall being built. When it finally came down, it seemed as though it had always been there and always would be. And then it--wasn't.
Chris W. @ 41: Fair point, but I don't know if we can let Mr. Rovell off the charge of nativism/racism--at least, the unconscious variety of same--quite that easily. I don't know his work, but do you (or anyone here who does read him regularly) think he would have made the same sort of mistake about a runner who had immigrated from, say, Finland as a 12-year-old? Or some other European nation with a fairly strong athlete-training tradition?
So. Um. Yeah. How’s the weather with you?
Cold, damp, and not nearly as elegantly worded.
But a sonnet makes the early frost almost worth enduring . . .
C. Wingate @ 10: Okay, I give up. What does "bogonic" mean? I've tried various dictionaries--mostly online, because I assumed it was a recent coinage--and got nothing. The best I've been able to figure out is that it's a derived from "bogo," in the sense of "buy one, get one."
Apologies to all for the off-topic question, but it's been driving me crazy.
Lee @ 320: The OED seems to think that the etymology for "the dozens" is roughly the same as for the noun "dozen," which is from Old French (as Serge indicated at 321). The earliest quote given for "the dozens" is 1928.
Elsewhere in the entry for "dozen," the OED also mentions various versions of the phrase "talking nineteen to the dozen," for "talking very quickly." I wonder if that has anything to do with the insult game?
Lori Coulson @ 42: Argh! I'm sorry, I can't help myself: "its-with-no-apostrophe" is the possessive pronoun; "its-with-an-apostrophe-after-the-s" basically doesn't exist. And "it-apostrophe-s" is the contraction for "it is."
Can you tell I just got finished with a set of freshmen essays? Believe me, I would much rather have spent the last few hours looking at these pretty pictures . . . this is an amazing find.
Earl Cooley III @ 73: Nope, all I had was a vague memory. When I did a quick google on "Fred Phelps" and "Holocaust," I came up with a quote from a WBC news release on an Anti-Defamation Leaque webpage, as follows:
“Whatever righteous cause the Jewish victims of the 1930s-40s Nazi Holocaust had, (probably miniscule, compared to the Jewish Holocausts against Middle Passage Blacks, African Americans and Christians -- including the bloody persecution of Westboro Baptist Church by Topeka Jews in the 1990s), has been drowned in sodomite semen. American taxpayers are financing this unholy monument to Jewish mendacity and greed and to filthy fag lust…Homosexuals and Jews dominated Nazi Germany…just as they now dominate this doomed U.S.A…The Jews now wander the earth despised, smitten with moral and spiritual blindness by a divine judicial stroke…And god has smitten Jews with a certain unique madness, whereby they are an astonishment of heart, a proverb, and a byword (the butt of jokes and ridicule) among all peoples whither the Lord has driven and scattered them…Jews, thus perverted, out of all proportion to their numbers energize the militant sodomite agenda…The American Jews are the real Nazis (misusers and abusers of governmental power) who hate God and the rule of law.â€
Don't know if that makes Phelps a genuine Denier or not. Still, he's at least a fellow-traveler, I'd say.
janeyolen @ 64: You know, I think I remember you talking about that at the time, but I hadn't made the connection. Isn't Phelps a Holocaust denier, too?
Sometimes the idiocy of which human beings are capable just astounds me.
abi @ 391: I caught the "400-comment long thread" in Greg Laden's comment, too. I remember thinking: "Is he talking about this thread?" and "But who is being the bully on this thread, instigating the conversation?" Didn't make sense to me, so I decided to keep my mouth shut (but I'm glad you didn't, respected moderator). Maybe it was a coincidence that this thread had almost reached 400 comments at that point, and he was really thinking of some other conversation entirely, but for what it's worth . . .
You know, it occurs to me that in terms of absolute numbers in any given population, there probably are fewer bullies than victims, and more neutrals than either. Given the group dynamics I've seen, and given the way people in this thread have mentioned specific bullies, it seems to me that it only takes one bully to poison a group, and even a group of bullies is sometimes (not always, of course) in the minority when compared to the total population.
I suppose it's partly related where you draw the line between being the bully and being the passive bystander or bully-enabler, too, and that's another issue. However, I bring this up mostly because it made me wonder: is one of the psychological side-effects of being a victim (possibly of being a bully, too) that the world becomes divided between bullies and victims, with no possibility of being uninvolved? Or even of being or acknowledging the possibility of someone being the person who provides helpful-but-non-bullying intervention? That would help to explain a LOT about some reactions I've seen online (not here, that I remember offhand): if you assume that your choice is between being a bully and being a victim, I know what I'm probably going to choose . . . to my embarrassment.
That got awfully convoluted, and I suspect it's something that has already been brought up, at least by implication. But I've never quite seen the situation from that angle before, so I thought I'd mention it anyway.
You know, the discussion of Fawlty Towers intrigues me. I was never a fan of the show--there are very few situation-comedies that I can watch, British or American--but if I'd been asked, and based on the few episodes I have seen, I'd have said that Basil/John Cleese was most often a "bully who gets his comeuppance" character. Apparently, many of the people in this thread don't read the show that way (so to speak). Maybe--the scars run so deep, even seeing a bully get bullied is too painful? (Or maybe I'm completely off in interpreting the admittedly-loud-mouthed Basil as any kind of a bully . . . as I said, I'm not really a fan of the show.)
Mycroft, Rikibeth, and Xopher, in particular, and everyone else in general: I appreciate how difficult this conversation must be for all of you. Thank you.
Xopher @ 215: Speaking as someone with experience in teaching high school, yes. The policy Lila outlines @ 208 is not just bad and--as you put it, "mind-bogglingly, jaw-droppingly wrong," it's downright stupid. Basic policy in the district I taught in was: the aggressor who initiated first contact, whatever it was, got the nuclear-option punishment, while the student who responded with a punch (not just by trying to shield himself, that didn't count at all) got . . . oh, a very minor punishment, by comparison. Sort of the equivalent of sending someone to a neutral corner to take a deep breath and calm down.
It didn't always work--nothing always works, and I was involved in at least one case that I still remember guiltily, where the policy went spectacularly wrong--but at least it was plain that the administration knew who was really to blame, and I think it kept the physical bullying to a minimum. Now, how we handled non-physical abuse . . . that was a lot less clear-cut, I'm afraid. One of the reasons I'm following this thread is to try to get some insight on how that kind of viciousness might be countered or prevented. Maybe.
Russell Coker @118: I am not inclined to believe anyone who claims that teachers tried to stop bullying but couldn't.
Maybe part of the problem in the situation that I described @91 was that we were trying to break a long established pattern; these were teenagers and not small children, after all. Maybe it was that the consequences we could offer just weren't important enough to this particular set of bullies, who, as it happens, were part of a group that probably wasn't planning on graduating from high school anyway and didn't much care what happened in class. In addition, much like Mark and Rikibeth above, we didn't want to let things go to the point where we would have had justification for calling the cops or expelling the bullies. Maybe--and this is probably as likely as anything--we, the teachers, just couldn't figure out what to do. I know I couldn't. But we did take the situation seriously, and we did try--and I've never been able to figure out what else we could have done.
As I said, it still bothers me.
Before anyone asks--at that time, anyway, and I believe today, expelling a student from public school required criminal action on the part of the student, pretty much, and usually the police were involved. And if the students were under a certain age, the district still had to figure out someplace else for them to go (even if they would have been happier dropping out).
Elise @ 79 and Raphael @ 87: Oh, God. Your comments (re: the authorities trying to stop the bullying and either not helping or making it worse) brought a vivid flashback from my high school teaching days. I'm not sure if it's relevant here or not, but--having brought up the idea that third-party intervention does seem to help, online at least--I may as well throw it into the mix.
We had a student, a young man, who was bullied mercilessly from the day he entered as a freshman. We did our damnedest to protect him and put a stop to it, and the net result of our efforts was: we kept the bullying down to a level where we couldn't quite justify taking serious action against the bullies. (Action, yes; serious, life-changing action, no.) That's something, I suppose--but neither I nor any of my colleagues felt that it was sufficient. We finally decided that there was no way we could keep this young man from being a target and got him into an experimental "open campus" program at another school. It got him a fresh start, with new people, anyway. I left the district not long after that, so I've no idea what happened to the student . . . but believe me, from a teacher's perspective, it felt as though we'd failed him.
Maybe sometimes you can't help. I don't know. Maybe times have changed enough that we could do a better job, today. I hope so.
I'm posting a link to n article in today's Chicago Tribune, for those of you who are currently struggling to help someone you love who has suffered a stroke: Their Friendship Is Pure Poetry.
I know the situations aren't analagous, really, but I thought maybe you could use a reminder that what you are doing does make a difference.
Bless you all.
Rikibeth @ 110: You wouldn't say that if you'd ever heard me sing. Honest. I'm a wonderful listener, not a singer. But I'll check out the Dead melody and try to hear Paula's words!
Velma @ 93: Good luck and blessings to you both!
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