The World's Common Tater

I saw a post on Facebook today about this being National Bullying Prevention Month and asked how we thought our schools are doing with combatting bullying. I wrote this post back when my son was in high school. His school made the news for having a big anti bully rally with famous people yet did no actual work in stopping it from happening. I hope it is better these days. Still everyone does need to shut up and do something.

My rant of today involves a growing trend I see of people talking a lot, but not really doing anything.

Yesterday I read this article –http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/top/2012/03/18-25/Tale-of-bullying-at-Arundel-High.html?ne=1 about bullying at my son’s school. In this case, the girl went to the administrators and absolutely nothing was done. This is the same school where a few years ago a boy was being bullied, nothing was done, the parents pulled him out of the school and he was later beat to death on the street by other teens. This is also the same school that earlier in the year made the news because they held a big anti-bullying rally featuring people from Facebook and the Cartoon Network.  Obviously, the rally was nothing more than a smoke screen to hide the fact that what is really happening is that reported bullying is swept under the rug and kept quiet to make the school look better.  The goal is to talk big about cracking down on bullying so that people think it is really being done. My message to the administrators – if you really want to help the kids at your school and you really want to change the culture Shut Up and Do Something.

This message also goes out to those in the religious world who talk and talk about love and acceptance and all of that good stuff but then practice hate and intolerance and a lot of bad stuff. I don’t believe the message in the Bible is “talk about loving your neighbor” or “talk about doing for the least of these”. I also don’t recall a but or an except in any of these passage as well. Love is an action. Love takes work. Instead of talking about “what would Jesus do” maybe we can start actually doing what Jesus did. In tater speak that means -Shut Up and Do Something.

I could go on and on about the business world, politics and other areas where this applies but instead I will just say to anyone reading this – Shut Up and Do Something.