Pushing it around

The topic of bullying has taken the country by storm in the past few months. Almost every school, youth group, club, and social organization has discussed the numerous deaths this year due to bullying related incidents, many because of homosexuality.
This past weekend, I participated in a program through my youth group discussing bullying and what forms it takes, along with many ideas about how it happens, why it happens, and how best to stop it. These experiences inspired me to write down my thoughts from the conversation in a post.

First of all, bullying has evolved as I have gotten older. It used to be a physical thing, making one kid actually feel physically intimidated by another. One kid was bigger, thus better at football, thus the kid who could exert influence over anyone else. Now, bullying isn't even seen through the term "bullying". Instead, teasing, harassment, hazing, and a plethora of other synonyms pepper society. All in all, the terms may change but the feelings are the same: the horrible feeling of not being loved, not being accepted, and not being good enough.

Whether or not it was recent or more in the past, everyone has been on either the giving end or receiving end of bullying at some point in their lives. The fact that it is so common should, in theory, lead to its demise. It is not, however, so easy to buck the trend and to get over the social tendency to make other feel bad in favor of a more positive environment. Unfortunately, all too often people see these types of acts as needing vengeance, and therefore pay it forward in a negative way, rather than doing the right thing and braking the chain.

The easiest type of bullying to do and the hardest to break is the act of doing nothing. When we sit back and let other people get bullied or harassed, we are just as guilty of the pain that that person suffers as the person actually doing the bullying. It isn't easy to stand up to someone who is tormenting someone else. There is a fear sometimes that the person will turn their attack on you, instead of the original target. Despite this, we need to be the bigger person in these situations and take a stand against those who attempt to break down the community that we try so hard to build up.

It is each of our jobs to stop this behavior in its tracks. No longer is it acceptable to stand idly by and watch others be put down, hurt, and emotionally beaten for any reason at all, whether it be because of race, sexual orientation, religious view, or simply who they are and what they enjoy doing. We are the generation that will stop this sort of behavior and instead build communities that encourage everyone to become better, to live together happily and to be truly happy. This might sound idealistic, but if we don't try to make ideal situations realities, the only one who we are beating is ourselves.

Part 2: Money matters

This is the second in a four part series of posts that deal with some of my most significant feels about change in the current world.

As much as I don’t like to admit it, money does make the world go round. For every good act or motion of kindness, at the very least money was needed to make it a possibility.

I just recently was exposed to an idea. This idea is referred to as the Pareto Principle. This principal states that, at least when used as intended, 80 percent of the wealth of a given area is owned by 20 percent of the people. This is fascinating, in that there are many statistics that show that even more of the percentage of wealth is owned by even less people. If so few people are making up so much of the wealth of a nation or of the world, then what is all of the money going towards?

A perfect example is the ever-more popular growth of ridiculous salaries in professional sports. Players are now making $100 million easily over a 6 to 10 year span. Such easy money makes me question why that money isn’t being sent elsewhere. As great as sports are, the bottom line is that they are not life and death situations. Why can’t all the money that one team was going to spend on one player go to one country to feed one population for one year? All of the ones add up.

There are lots of places that this can be seen. Whether it is one nights proceeds in a certain form of entertainment or certain sporting events or a thousand of other areas, if just a few corporations spent even one night giving away everything it raised, then why couldn’t we, as a people, completely annihilate hunger on a global scale.

Apple just released the new iPhone 4G. Thousands and thousands of people flocked to get this phone the instant it hit the market. I have an idea. Goodness knows that there will be SOME form of iPhone 5 (whether it is in the form of a phone or something all the more outlandish). What if every dime that was made by the selling of this item went to solving hunger problems in third world countries? Here is what I see happening: The iPhone 5 sells several thousand items in the first year. All of the money goes to saving starving African villages. Now when Apple releases a new computer the following month, all of the money goes straight to Apple to compensate for the lost money that they suffered (if you can call solving world hunger suffering) by giving the money away. Well, now that Apple has demonstrated a public interest in solving global issues, all of a sudden everyone wants to buy an Apple computer because the image of the company is one of compassion and selflessness. All of a sudden, not only has Apple made back every dime it lost from the iPhone experiment, but has grown their business in the process. Everyone wins.

Now this experiment may seem outrageous, and frankly I don’t know enough about organizations and how much profit certain groups make. Apple may not make enough per unit to make this feasible, let alone realistic. All I am saying is that steps can and should be made to make sure that important issues are taken care of, and if we continue to say things like “that isn’t the way things work,” we will never, ever see results.