Some of you might be familiar with NPR's This I Believe series. If not please give it a look. It is filled with values and stories that will hopefully make your faith in humanity a little stronger.
A week ago my Civics and Ethics professor assigned us to write our own essay about what we believe. At first I thought that this would be an easy assignment. It wasn't...Nothing seemed right or to fit. Nothing that I thought of held enough value or significance to even consider. Finally, I decided to write about something I felt guilty about. Something, that I would like to change. In myself and in others.
Often times we believe we are good people because we are kind to one another. We don't hurt each other. I felt this way....But how could I justify this view of myself when I would sit back and watch others brutalize one another? How am I a better person than them if I do nothing to stop them?
This is the paper I wrote for this assignment. It's a little rough still only being a first draft, but I'll replace it once my final piece is done.
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I grew up in a small town. The
majority of the kids in my preschool were the same kids I graduated with. We
know every little aspect about one another. We’ve seen each other grown up. We
feel as if we know everything there is to know about on another. We are familiar to a point of contempt.
Fittingly
it was Aesop, the author of many well-known fairy tales, who said “ Familiarity
breeds contempt.” Our familiarity caused
some amount of cruelness to occur to our
classmates that for one reason or another
where viewed as different from the rest of us. While I never took part in the cruelty I
never did anything to stop it.
One classmate
in particular ,who I will refer to as Jeb, received the blunt of it. Jeb
suffered from learning disabilities and behavioral problems. In elementary school a game developed that
involved touching Jack and then tagging someone else yelling “Jeb Germs!”.
For elementary schoolers this behavior isn’t shocking . What is, is the
fact it continued well into high school. Along with the game people called Jeb
names. Two boys I even consider to be good friends made up a song taunting Jeb.
As I
said before I never took part in these bullying occurrences, but I never did
give much effort to stop it. The fact that I never did will shame me till my
dying day. Jeb handled the cruelties thrust upon him by his peers
for the most part with a cold shoulder and occasional fits of rage. And
although these actions seemed small to my classmates, and even to me, there have been individuals who have ended
their lives for less.
Plato is quoted as saying “ Be kind, for
everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
I believe that kindness is not enough.
Often, kindness, no matter how great, is overshadowed by brutality. I
challenge you, and who ever else might read this , to do what I failed to do
for Jeb. I challenge you to stand up for the little man, because if you aren’t
helping him you are hurting him.
I leave you with one last quote from Aesop “He
that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own.”
