Official Participant in the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon

Our second attempt of a cross interweb discussion this week brought out a lot of interesting, thought provoking ideas. But when it comes to the issue of violence in today’s society one-week can only scratch the surface of a topic that is growing and evolving by the minute.

Take the story that ran this week in the New York Times about bullying. The violence stemming out of situations like these that directly relate to young people is a scary and clear sign that the manifestation of violence has become more than just people with a guns and a grudge taking shots at one another but violence for the sake of violence.

I was bullied when I was in middle school, it wasn’t to the same extent of getting my face punched it. But looking back, bullying seems more like the ‘in’ thing to do. On the one side you have the “normal” band of social groups who exist in their own state of mind. In many cases I think people who they think of as ‘weird’ or ‘different’ become targets because they don’t fit into what these people view as normal.

Two girls who I thought were my friends once locked me in a school bathroom stall when I was in elementary school. I still don’t know why they did it. Was it my eagerness to befriend them that made them treat me the way they did? Maybe their actions were just an expression of aggression because I wasn’t a carbon copy of them. But needless to say situations like these happened more than once during my middle school and high school years.

But there is a difference between getting locked in a bathroom and getting kicked in the face. My best friend was with his parents in their car when he hopped out to get pizza. A couple guys surrounded him and told him to hand over the food. They tried to jump on him but luckily my friend was a good runner and only got a knock to the jaw.

Like many of this week’s blogs discussed, the epidemic of violence has surrounded us, silenced us, and forced us to come to several unnerving conclusions but I suppose is it better to have talked about it—then ignored it all together.
—Eming Piansay