Gagafesto "END BULLYING NOW (Repeat after Gaga)" gagablog 40

When Gaga met President Obama to propose a new campaign to end bullying I wrote gagablog 36 to point out how bullying was also the problem with the Syrian government, and others, using the military to bully their people, and the Greedy 1% using corporate lobbyists and devisive big-money politics to bully the 99% with unfair policies that exploit us and SuperPACs that disenfranchise us. Yesterday a boy who had been bullied for years in school shot 5 other kids in Ohio and I want to address the "typical" kind of bullying we are all aware of but we certainly are not doing enough to end.
I'm not blaming the bullies for the killings because we are all responsible for our actions and there is no excuse for killing people. There is also no excuse for bullying and it is logical that if this boy had not been bullied then he would not have killed his peers. So the bullies, and our culture of bullying, are partly to blame for these deaths and also for what they did to this boy in the first place whether he did something worse or not. If he had not killed anyone or acted out at all - or if he had killed himself as too many who are bullied do - the bullies are to blame for what they did to him and should feel responsible.
I noticed some things in the news coverage of this tragedy that compelled me to make this point. One was an interview with one of the boys who had been shot but was grazed by the bullet. It is already well-established that the killer, T. J., had been bullied for years. When giving a description of the boy, the shooting victim said things like he "used to be one of us" and that he had become withdrawn or isolated himself in the last few years. Maybe he did isolate himself but I am sure he did not say "I'll be over here if anyone wants to bully me." He did not invite bullying and surely it contributed to his isolation. There may be other factors but from what has come out so far it seems certain that the bullying was a major motivation for these murders. The victim who made these comments might not have been a bully but was aware that T. J. was bullied and I believe the way he said that T.J. had isolated himself was a means of absolving the bullies from their role and blame in this whole situation. I'm sure kids at that school feel guilty for bullying him now, in a way, and I only wish that they would have felt guilty about it before and stopped. This is why we need to focus on this issue because only awareness and conscious change will make "school shootings" go away. And the way to do it is to change the culture that allows this to happen and to say at every occasion how bullying is wrong but also to do the opposite of bullying and encourage and include people because it is the lack of supprt and acceptance that makes kids, and adults, despair and take desperate or vengeful action.
A lady who was interviewed on CNN, who wrote a book about bullying, said that we need to change the culture and the news anchor responded that that was too big a task so what can we do now. While reactive solutions might make lots of money for metal detector companies, security firms, or more Big Brothers on the internet, they aren't going to solve the problem because they won't stop the bullying. Schools breed despair and stress in our culture and while a natural response to seeing someone in distress is to sympathize, when there is way too much stress and cliques and isolation in play as we have in our schools people don't try to help each other, seeing the despair as something to alleviate, but too often just try to manage it by making someone else feel more despair than they do and at least feel superior to someone in a system that makes everyone feel pretty bad. We have to change this, in our schools and in society at large. We need a culture in which we support and incude each other.
I'm not trying to blame the media for this tragedy either but it is important to recognize how they not only reflect some of our bullying culture but continue it with assumptions like this one that it is too pervasive to change. One thing that upset me in the coverage of this is when a newscaster said it was "ironic" that families moved to this area to "get away from this kind of thing". To me, this idea that we can "get away" from certain people and if we don't have to see them we don't have to care is the heart of the problem. The worst bullies are still the governments that can kill the opposition but every bully acts out of some sort of powerful position. Therefore it is the duty of the powerful to make sure they do not bully anyone, even unintentionally. And indeed it is the duty of everyone to pay attention to each other and help each other out. It is only due to an overabundance of despair that we retreat from larger community and want to only take care of "our own." The only way to overcome despair is to work together, since the despair itself is the result of our divisions. The more people and varieties of people we consider "our own" and can work with the more we can overcome. It's the "us and them" mentality that is the problem, exclusion is the problem. We shouldn't say "God Bless America" we should say "Goddess Bless the World". We can't even save ourselves, humans, if we don't want to save the whole planet and all life on it. We should seek benefit for all, at no one's expense and we can have this but we must first believe that we can then oppose the forces that would hold us back.
One newscaster suggested their was a problem with having the "troubled school" kids change busses with the "regular school kids". More separation is not the solution, it is the problem. If the kids in this "idyllic" community had been exposed to more diversity they might not have felt guilty for seeing someone worse off then they and decided to bully him to justify why their lives seemed better, trying to make it like he deserved pain by heaping more on. This is the heart of our culture of bullying, the idea that if something makes me feel bad the solution is to make you feel worse. We have great wealth in America yet instead of great altruism many rich people resent the poor and just want to keep them poor and out of mind. It is because they feel guilty for having so much more and they should, and should do something about it. We always try to focus on what is wrong with the "bad kid" like it is all his fault. It isn't only the bullies who share the blame or the media for perpetuating this paradigm. We are all part of a culture that accepts bullying in many forms and focuses on division instead of common good. It is all connected to bullying by the wealthy and by abusive government and the question goes both ways: if we can't teach kids to stop bullying in schools, how can we get governments to stop bullying? And if we can't set an example by ending bullying as a nation, as a culture, or in whatver groups we belong, how can we be an example to kids? We have to oppose bullying in all its forms, from kids who feel despair and seek to control it by weilding it over others instead of alleviating it, to politicians and their mobs who believe education is only for those who can afford it, like Rick Santorum says, since they believe in a vengeful God who punishes people by making them poor, the same argument that the bullied kid deserves it because he is worse off to start with. We have to see ourselves as part of a larger group and take the "outsiders" into account. This is why I love Gaga's song "Bad Kids" so much because takes the perpective of the "bad kid" and points out that we are products of our environments but our hearts are naturally good and therefore there is good in everyone and the way to be the best is to recognize everyone's essential goodness and honor it. If we do that, we won't be able to bully other kids anymore, we will care about them. And we won't be able to bully other countries anymore if we remember that people are really good.
We have to evolve past this fear of each other that leads people to think they need guns in the first place. The same mentality that makes an individual think he needs a gun is what makes us think we need the strongest and most weapons as a country. The way to avoid getting shot is not to have the biggest gun, it is to remove people's fears that make them want guns at all. The greedy rich and their right-wing political stooges traffic in arms and fear and we need to put them out of business entirely in both markets. In the future we will have no fearmongering, warmongering or arms dealing. The people who like that sort of thing can play the video game versions where the only casualties are ego. But we have to get there, to the future, and the only way to go is all together.
When the "Born this Way" video came out and the Arab Spring was flowering in bloody and liberating blooms, I think I misinterpretted a message Gaga gives in the intro about protecting her monsters, protecting the outkasts and oppressed. At the time I was considering this idea that in some cases force is necessary to oppose evil. But when I think about it now I am reminded of the line from "The Queen" where she says "I don't need these 14 karat guns to win I'm a woman I insist it's my right". In a way, between the images of her with the machine guns at the start of Born This Way and the idea of her Golden Gun, I missed the more direct point that she really Does. Not. Need. Guns. None of us do. Instead, we all have the right to our lives and we should all insist on those rights being respected, especially where there is a lack of respect for women or minorities or the "poor masses" - but no matter what groups we identify with we should all be working toward a culture of respect.
I want to apply this principle to my magical intention for Syria now. I have decided that when the choice is supposedly between a diplomatic solution and a military one, the answer will be both non-military and undiplomatic. By which I mean, there is no reason to respect a bullying regime, to treat them diplomatically in the general sense - it is time to shame and humilate them. And there is no reason to kill them, just as T. J. did not have to kill anyone in reaction to bullying. In fact, bringing greater military might to end the situation only perpetuates the bullying culture that the biggest weapon is right and whoever is willing to kill the most people gets to decide what happens. I expect that some strange occurances will take place that end this conflict in a very surprising way. I really think that we can learn a much needed lesson about bullying from this latest "school shooting" and also from how our elections are being bought and how the Syria government is killing its people and our helplessness to stop it. If we address all of these issues with the same lens, that bullying is wrong and must be stopped in all its forms, including the ones we are part of such as the great american military, we can grow out of the culture of bullying and division to one of support and unity.
Thanks Gaga for the infinite ways you inspire us but also for the focus you have brought to this issue. We are gonna win this one and end the bullying game. You set us up perfectly for it and give hope to the outkasts to find acceptance and make changes with our voices and art, not bullets.