Bullying -- A Personal Reflection

Here is a list of a few recognizable quotations, which have to do with "Getting Along with People - Disabled or Non Disabled."

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
-The Golden Rule

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
-Confucius

What you do to the least of them, you do unto me.
- Jesus Christ

To have a friend, you must be a friend.
- Bunny Seger

The aforementioned are some of the wisdom passed down over the ages from people you may have heard about. The last one is from my mother, who often gave sage advice to not just me and my brother, but to many people, especially her friends. She had quite a few.

When I was just a tiny little girl, not even in kindergarten, one of the local nursery school providers called my mum and said to her that perhaps with my "problem" I should be in her nursery school program to be socialized with normal children. My mother looking out on our front lawn, where at the time there was a bunch of kids ranging in ages from 4 to about 10 said to her politely, "I don't know if I want Elizabeth to get any more social, there's a crowd of kids in our front yard now playing happily." And it's true there always was a tribe of kids at our house between my brother and me.

I just never had problems making friends, well maybe in junior high, but then so did all the kids, despite the fact that I was the lone disabled kid at the school.

My parents early on had refused to send me to the blind school, saying that they had waited 7 years to have me, why would they send me away to be forgotten in an institution as the "experts" had advised them to do. They preferred that I go to school with the kids in my neighborhood and experience the rough and tumble of society.

There were no special education teachers at the time, early sixties in small town Ontario, no educational aides, but since I was intellectually able to keep up in the class, they would work with me in the evenings, if I needed any extra help. Unlike the "helicopter" parents of today who are overly involved in their children's lives defending their children over every little thing. My parents taught me to advocate for myself and only intervened when they had to, like physical injury or outright unfairness. I once had a teacher give me a mimeographed paper that was so light in print that even when you held it up to the light it was difficult to see what was on it and so naturally I failed the test. I brought it home to be signed. My mother said, where's the test and I said it's here and gave her the page. Even she couldn't see what was written on it, so the teacher got a phone call and a visit, as did the principal, whose daughter was in my class and had told her father what the teacher had done to me, ahead of my mum's visit.

She used to tell me all the time that I'd better learn to stand up for myself because your father and I aren't always going to be here and you should learn to adapt to the world, because the world isn't going to adapt to you.

They instilled in me an honest good sense of social justice and helped me to develop empathy at an early age that allowed me to understand dignity and equity, but not just my own, other people's as well.

They affirmed to me that I was just as good as anyone else, whether it was my brother, my friends, or people I came in contact with in school or university, on the job or anywhere else in society.

I had my share of bullies whether in the schoolyard or in high school clubs, universities or working. And I've come to realize that bullies, no matter who they are including bureaucrats, professional "experts", or in corporations all share the same traits as the schoolyard bully, the cyber bully, the workplace bully. Bullies are insecure, have low senses of self -esteem, little or no social skills and lack empathy. They outwardly attack and diminish their targets by unjustly criticizing them, being trivial in their fault finding, humiliating them in a public way, usually in front of others. They ignore, isolate, over-rule and exclude their targets.

In the workplace, as a justification for their aberrant behavior, workplace bullies say that they are just weeding out the unsuitable people from the workplace culture.

Workplace bullies often threaten their target's work status, whether it be their age, their sex, their gender orientation, their race, their religion or disability. They isolate their targets from opportunities and information, give them undue pressure through deadlines that are too short, or they steal the credit for the work done by their target. Workplace bullies constantly remind their targets of deadlines or past mistakes or failures.

Many corporate workplace bullies see bullying as a rite of passage, with name calling, unwanted physical contact and practical jokes.

Lest you think I'm being overly politically correct here the International Labour Organization, states that physical and emotional violence at work is one of the most serious problems facing the workplace in the new millennium. They defined workplace violence as any incident in which a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances relating to their work.

And workplace bullies can be anyone, bosses-both male and female, supervisors or other bureaucratic higher-ups, co-workers. Fifty-eight percent of workplace bullies cited in various studies have been women. One in five Americans have been bullied in the workplace in the last year.

The targets of bullying are not always weak, ineffectual people or odd or different. Rather they are capable, dedicated staff members, usually well liked by co-workers and demonstrate a cooperative and non-confrontational style, which poses a threat to the workplace bully or any other bully.

What I don't understand, however, are the people who stand by and watch people being bullied and do nothing about it. There is the famous case of Katie Genovese in the mid sixties being murdered in front of people in their houses and apartment buildings and nobody did anything to stop it. It wasn't their problem. Mistreatment of anything, animal or fellow human being is my problem and I learned from my parents to stand up to bullies, no matter who they were.

I sometimes defused the bullies with self-deprecating humor. Being able to laugh at yourself is always a good trait and a self defense mechanism. You laugh at yourself before a bully can. However, generally when defusing a bully I was thoughtful about my retaliation and informed. My "Bless the Mess" article is an example of that.

Being empathetic, thinking out of the box apparently is a new way employers are looking at future employees. It's called right brain thinking. According to Dan Pink employers want that kind of creativity in their workplaces just as much as linear left brain thinkers. In other words Emotional IQ is becoming as important as standard IQ. Soft skills are becoming more valued in the corporate world.

I'm glad my mother and my dad emphasized caring about someone else not before me , but along side of me . I have friends, online and offline from the Yukon to Tasmania and every point in between. They've been with me a long time, some are disabled, and many have no disabilities. I've been friends with people whose parents worked as garbage men and friends with the niece of a Supreme Court Justice of Canada. I don't look to just socialize with "Somebodies" because they are "Somebody" but my friends are my friends because we share something important, we genuinely like one another.

Fuller addresses the subject in this way. "The indignities we inflict on others and those inflicted on us build until they erupt in indignation. The remedy for this is as simple as it is ancient. Protect the dignity of others as you would your own."

"They foresaw that equilibrium would be reached only when everyone enjoyed equal protection against indignity and injustice... In a world where rankism is the exception rather than the rule, targets of intentional abuse will become quite rare. We will keep our word to those of lower rank, just as we do to those of higher rank. Some people may still feel like nobodies, but no shame will attach to that, and barriers impeding changes of rank, will be dissolved."

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