Sports I lustraded

Here is the story of Marina and how she was brutalized by the jocks at her school while everyone else, including the teachers, just looked the other way or even helped out to go along with the "in" jock crowd. Read it all at Columbine

You all know what she is talking about. We all saw it growing up and the jock attitude is a major theme in our popular entertainment. Everyone knows how jocks act and just about everyone, including the jocks, has some tale of a horrible incident involving someone in a letter jacket brutalizing them horribly.

I think bullying is inherent in the system. Sports kids are trained from day one to scoff at those who are weaker or less skilled and to be overly aggressive and proud of their strength, which is often the only thing they have going for them.

Team sports is a dog eat dog world and only the best survive. Coaches often use the war analogy and train their teams as if they were soldiers out to "kill the enemy". Then to top it all off the kids and adults alike idolize these impressionable children who develop egos that are often destructive to themselves and those around them.

Why is it you never see a group of geeks taunting each other or insulting each others bodies? Why don't find the "freaks" always ganging up on someone because they are different or might wear different clothes?

Marina's sister tells us that:

"She was sorta strange, she read either thick romances or books about witchcraft, though the latter seemed like a response to the teasing she endured. Her family was poor, so she wore cheap, ill-fitting clothes, though she was never concerned about her appearance to begin with, another characteristic that set her apart from her schoolmates."

Whoops, that's just asking for trouble from jocks in high school. What do you mean you don't have the latest fashions or actually read? You are in for a hellish existence anytime you find a group of sports fanatics within 100 feet of you.

Sure enough, Marina has many tales to tell us:

"I could see that no one would pair with her for partner drills, and her teammates did nothing to hide their eye-rolling and snickers when she flubbed a pass or tripped over her own feet. A few times during the season it got so bad that Marina ran sobbing from the gym, and I would find her curled up in a doorway or in the still-dry showers, unable through her tears to tell me exactly what they'd done."

"Near the end of a long season, one particularly spiteful girl, a very cute and popular girl from a supposedly good family, bounced the basketball off Marina's head, and laughed. The girl, Tami, later claimed it was an accident; Marina said otherwise. The school principal sided with Tami, perhaps because Marina's ostracism called her credibility into question."

OH, big surprise there, the principal sided with the rich basketball star over the weirdly dressed strange poor chick. Well that hasn't changed since I was a boy. But this kind of treatment by officials just leads to frustration which often turns to violence as we see here:

"All of it: the cruel taunts she faced in the hallways every school day; the way football player David would sarcastically ask her out on a date every time he saw her; the way his friends pretended to hump her from behind as she tried to hide her red face in her open locker; the times her classmates yanked her book away and tore it up before her eyes; the wrenching betrayal and disappointment she felt after having auditioned fearlessly and brilliantly for the school play, only to have the woman she'd thought of as her favorite teacher allow the other students to persuade her to keep Marina hidden in the chorus; the assortment of degradations she lived through every afternoon in basketball practice, ... all of this and more built up and got pushed down and built up again, until Marina took a step off the deep end:

Marina waited until no one was paying much attention, and then she curled her arm around Tami neck, her slender, white throat in the crook of Marina's elbow, and she lifted her up from behind, trying ever so quietly to throttle her."

I'm not surprised. There is only so much you can take, particularly at that age and it's a crime that teachers and officials did nothing to stop this. In most states what this girl went through on a daily basis would be considered criminal and teachers are bound by law to report it.

Why don't they? Who wants to be the one who got the star quarterback kicked off the team or had the head cheerleader arrested for assault? Nobody. But they will arrest the crazy girl the very first time. Our story finishes with:

"Marina was placed in a juvenile detention center, where she briefly thrived in the classes and quickly made friends with the other "freaks" there."

Gee, she thrived when she was treated with respect and as a valued human being by people who didn't mind her being a little different. Who knew that would work? Freaks knew, we've always known. It's not how well you can run or jump or throw a ball that counts, it's how you treat others around you, especially those who are supposed to be on your "team".

Let's see if we can't start to help the Marina's of the world. Don't stand for the sports fanatic attitude anymore, especially in our schools. We've lost too many good kids already to the anger and rage that builds with the daily taunting by those who society deems better than the rest of us.

Just say no to bullying whenever you see it happening. Perhaps a good new year's resolution for all of us, don't you think?