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Boston Herald Peter Gelzinis column: Cruel dose of virtual reality for lawmakers
Mar 19, 2010 (Boston Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Remember when the top priority of every engaged parent was making sure your child was computer literate by second grade?
With today's middle school kids now expert in the shabby art of "sexting" each another on phones that double as tiny computers, you might say we have succeeded to an obscene degree.
Our kids have used technology to redefine everything -- including how they set out to torment one another. Bullying left the schoolyards and cafeterias for places like Facebook and YouTube a long time ago.
Up at the State House yesterday, just about all of the politicians who mulled over a bill designed to curb today's cyber-charged strain of bullying were old enough to remember when spitballs, dope slaps and rumors fed by rotary phones were the chosen implements of intimidation and humiliation.
But it appears the suicides of Phoebe Prince in South Hadley and Carl Walker in Springfield have dragged most of these state reps into the 21st century.
"When we grew up, bullying was largely confined to the playgounds and the schoolyards," said Robert Trestan, civil rights counsel to the Anti-Defamation League, who haunted the State House's marbled corridors yesterday.
"With the kind of technology kids have access to now, bullying has become something from which there is literally no escape. It follows you home from school and then into the world of the Internet."
As the legislative wrangling dragged on late yesterday afternoon, Trestan allowed himself to feel optimistic that lawmakers were coming around to the notion that bullying was no longer just a rite of passage.
"Try to explain to Sirbeaner Walker that what contributed to her 11-year-old son's death was really nothing more than other kids at his Springfield school going through a rite of passage," Trestan said.
"Before he left school on the final day of his life, Carl Walker got a message that someone was going to kill him. People at that school were aware, but no one there bothered to call the police or even mention it to his mother.
"No, bullying is no longer just a teenage rite of passage," Trestan added. "It's evolved into something far more sinister and dangerous."
Like it or not, our children exist in a cyber universe. They text and tweet and IM their viciousness over a virtual highway where cruelty, like everything else, seems infinite.
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