Last week, this plea from an 8-year-old kid from North Carolina surfaced online:
“Dear Santa: I wanted a remote control car and helicopter but I do not want that anymore. Kids at school are still picking on Amber [my twin sister] and it is not fair because she does not do anything to them and it makes me mad. I prayed they would stop, but God is busy and I need your help. Is it against the rules to give up gifts early?”
To add salt to the wound, his sister suffers from multiple mental disorders.
Bullying-related suicides and ‘revenge’ shootings at schools shock our conscience. Florida, like other states, has enacted a tough anti-bullying law to reduce further tragedies.
The legal response to the bullying crisis reveals our reactive cultural mindset. Instead of dealing with the core issue, we’re lazily patching up the symptom — which is better than nothing.
The root of bullying — a disregard for others’ emotions — pervades all our interactions, from kids to adults. The perceived innocence of childhood prevents us from making sense of this kind of meanness, leading the victims to self-destruction. For the rest of us, we accept that life is unfair and begrudgingly endure interpersonal cruelties. We escape the resulting inner sadness by seeking joy elsewhere.
Past generations could never dream of the technological sophistication we enjoy today: Realize, for example, that the processing power in our iPhones exceeds that of the Apollo moon missions. No longer are vast amounts of data restricted to the elite few — information equality governs the Internet.
Despite all this progress, we forgot how to be human.
Atheists write skillful critiques on the irrationality of organized religion while the faithful lament on airwaves about godlessness plaguing society. As advocates of some worldview or the other, we’ve become experts on intellectually destroying each other with polysyllabic posturing.
But we somehow forgot how to be human.
“Compassion is the chief law of human existence,” wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Our disregard for each other and perpetual neglect of moral truisms — e.g., “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — is wreaking societal havoc.
Take the recent case of the Alligator exposing UF’s rape culture and compelling readers to deal with homegrown sexual violence. As pursuers of a gentler world, let’s dig deeper.
The barbarity of rape is lost to many from my gender for whom objectifying women is perfectly normal. For many men, a young woman’s worth comes solely from her resemblance to a delicately sculpted chunk of flesh. Once again, if we lived by the “treat others as you’d like to be treated” line, no self-respecting male could imagine reducing others to mere physicality.
Too many lives hang in jeopardy — from pledges at fraternities being publicly humiliated under the guise of fostering “brotherhood” to poor American families being cut off from food stamps by a callous Congress — for us to play the waiting game.
The solution lies within you and me. Compassion begins with increasing empathy and kindness in our interpersonal dealings and culminates in a nation guided by ethical policies.
Imagine the sorrow endured by Amber, the mentally ill schoolgirl. Her 8-year-old twin brother is begging Santa for help. The ball is in our court: If you and I decide to lead lives considerate of others’ feelings and pain, my faith in trickle-down ethics convinces me that little Amber won’t have to wait for Christmas.
Zulkar Khan is a UF microbiology senior. His column runs on Wednesdays. A version of this column ran on page 6 on 9/25/2013 under the headline "Trickle-down ethics: We need to be human"
