The Roots of Bullying: The Uncivil Discourse of Adults

In prevention, we spend a great deal of time trying to address the behavior itself rather than the root causes of the behavior.

Adolescent bullying serves as a classic case-in-point. The recent media attention to a spate of pre-teen, teen, and young adult suicides blamed on bullying behavior has posed the constant question: What are our schools doing to stop kids from bullying?

The better question may be: what has allowed bullying to become such a popular social practice?

The answer is no different for bullying than it is for all other social practices. Kids bully because they see the practice in action from us adults. Best-selling author Barbara Coloroso argues that we've created a culture that rewards bullies and blames targets, regardless of their age. In other words, bullies are created from a culture of incivility, rudeness, and bullying -- what we might term a "culture of contempt."

The evidence to support this argument is downright damning. A church in Topeka, Kansas is in the throws of a Supreme Court case to defend its right to attend the funerals of soldiers waving "God Hates You" signs, among others. Ed Brown must apologize for planning to represent his political opponent as a "whore." At a recent speech in Houston (although just about any manuscript of her speeches will find the same style of rhetoric), Sarah Palin blamed Obama for enabling abortion, and continued to coin the term "Obamacare" as a reference for the Health Care Reform bill. Sadly, this Health Care Reform Act actually does much more to benefit aging Republicans (and Tea Party members) than it does young women seeking an abortion. There's much more to say about this and so many other "outrageous claims" that mark our political discourse, but that's for another time.

On a broader level, adult bullying has actually become our favorite form of entertainment, especially on television. Bullying behavior, which involves vilification, ridicule, harassment, and a rhetorical strategy that is best described as "you suck" discourse, is the mainstay element of everything from Judge Judy to Big Brother. Most reality television programs have at least one bully as a mainstay of the show. And lately, the villian rarely "gets theirs" in the end. Usually, they come off as the hero.

Bullying has been and continues to be a way in which we adults sometimes enact or defeat policies, whether they are being debated on a local, state, or federal level (let's look no further than gay marriage as an example, though many others abound). Ask any customer service representative about being bullied and they'll tell you it's become the consumer's favorite way to get what they want when they want it.

Last, but not least, this opinion-rich digital environment where many of us voice and share our thoughts is certainly home to many bullies, who tend to leave nasty anonymous comments that seem to do little to add to the dialogue and are intended instead to cause hurt and shame.

There's little doubt that we're seeing an increases in uncivil behavior, including bullying in the workplace, schoolyard, educational institution, and coalition meeting. But what lives behind this behavior, and how do we dig out that root?

In her book The Bully, The Bullied, and the Bystander, Ms. Coloroso defines bullying as contempt. In other words, we hold contempt for one another rather than celebrate our individual differences and unique abilities. Psychologists may argue that we do so as a way of feeling better about ourselves, but it may also simply be that we hold contempt for others because we truly believe that we are better, and that others are inferior.

I would suggest that, for some, bullying is a rhetorical strategy that we use only because we believe that it gets us what we want. Having worked in an academic environment for many years, I've seen countless examples of faculty and administrators bullying students, fellow faculty, fellow administrators, or the public simply to get their way.

I'm certainly appalled at the issue of bullying and saddened by the tragic results. But I'm far more concerned about the deeper problem of a culture that forgot how to appreciate differences, acknowledge the value of others, or recognize the impact of narcissism on the fate of the planet.

I'm concerned that "a culture of contempt" has become a mainstay of the media industry, with a growing number of programs and media forms that highlight (and profit from) our contempt for others. And finally, I'm concerned about our inability to see the broader issue play out in front of us. I sense from the discourse about bullying that we're just not seeing the big picture here.

The solution to all unwanted social practices is the same. Each of us must share in the responsibility of creating a culture of appreciation rather than a culture of contempt. It isn't easy, because we've convinced ourselves that the nasty comment we make about a coworker is all in good fun and lets us let out steam, and the ugliness we see in others is their business, not ours.

We must be willing to ask, though, how we might be supporting the environment that enables bullies, be they 14 or 45. A set of questions might get the ball rolling:

• Am I watching contempt for others as a form of entertainment on television or in the movies?
• Am I engaging in small acts of bullying when I want to get my way at home, at work, or in the community?
• Have I allowed the contempt displayed by leaders, politicians, bosses, neighbors, friends, or family to remain unchallenged?

The answers may surprise you. They surprised me. Imagine if each of us stopped just one aspect of this, decried the culture of contempt as much as we decried smoking in buildings or trans fat in foods.

Though a culture of appreciation may not yield the same sarcastic bite that makes us a hit at parties or adds the zing to those shows on the Bravo network, it just might save a few lives.

The Role of Appreciation in Community Development

The Bravo cable television network--originally created to broadcast cultural programs to that small segment of the television audience that enjoys ballet, opera, live theater, and art--learned quickly that small niche markets are not the stuff of cable success; the network quickly evolved into a more popular form of entertainment to find its path to fame: showing rich, self-consumed people snipe at everyone around them. And find it they did.

One recent Saturday, while I sat at the kitchen table most of the day trying to edit a particularly frustrating document, the TV was stuck on Bravo, with family members coming in and out of the adjacent living room to watch one show or another. My background music for four hours was the endless chatter from The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C. followed by the Real Housewives of Atlanta, two episodes of Flipped Out and two of The Rachel Zoe Project.

I recounted the interactions I had half-heard over the time period. Most involved at least one person who was having an emotional breakdown over another person's (a) fashion choices, (b) attitude, or (c) existence. I realized that the conversations I had overheard throughout the past four hours was ongoing, endless conflict, usually about incredibly trivial and unimportant matters.

Perhaps I had just caught a particularly nasty four hour stretch of Bravo programming. I decided to watch at least one episode of as many of the Bravo shows as I could stomach to check my hypothesis. To be fair, there are other shows on the network, including an endless parade of artistic competition shows, where chefs, artists, designers, or hairstylists try to out-talent one another. But even these programs are filled with jealousy, petty arguments, and self-absorption. Suffice it to say that for at least some segment of our culture, vicarious narcissism and negativity holds sway.

There's a bigger problem for most communities than a few self-absorbed individuals who love to establish their authority by putting others down. My sour reaction to a day of Bravo programming had more to do with the overall frame of reference seen in each of the shows. There was always something wrong, and the "real" people in each reality show saw themselves as valiant soldiers who fought through the muck and mire to overcome the banality or incompetence or unfabulousness of the poor wrecks around them.

Unfortunately, I see the same frame often in community prevention. I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw a community prevention specialist slam the community in which he or she lives and attempt to "fix" all of its problems by proclaiming them loudly. Many of those "problems" are actually people who disagree with a philosophy or approach, or who may just have lost their way. Kenneth Burke called it the "tragic frame" where we construct a world of "victims and villains," moral wrongs that can only be righted through some form of mortification.

In my experience, though, the tragic frame has never proven effective in improving communities or building effective partnerships. Finding fault with others who share your community (artistic or otherwise) seems to only yield division. It's difficult to find synchronicity or synergy (much less consensus or collaboration) if everyone is trying to establish superiority by punishing the weaknesses of everyone else.

One of my favorite organizational philosophies is appreciative inquiry, where a community or organization focuses on its existing potential to create an improved environment. This is much more than a group of people thinking good thoughts about each other. This is about a community focusing on the very best aspects of itself in order to see the path toward even more success. Funny how hard it is to0 find a solution when you're so deeply focused on the problem.

In A Positive Revolution in Change: Appreciative Inquiry, authors David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney write, "In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design."

In community-based prevention work, this means--at least for me--that rather than focusing on the villains who make and sell dangerous substances, promote or exploit unsafe practices, or create barriers to change, we focus on the many parts of the community that operate in ways that are safe, productive, and enjoyable, identifying what enables these practices and finding ways to extend that environment. It means focusing on the normative majority, which is often much more aligned with the outcomes of prevention than the small percentage who seem to own culture. Most importantly, though, it means appreciating a perspective that is different than your own, and finding value in that different perspective long enough to see how it might be joined with your own.

It's difficult to bridge perspectives with any segment of the community if I see nothing but the worst in that perspective. Perhaps it is greed that motivates the bar owner to sell alcohol to obviously intoxicated patrons, but usually, there are other reasons, including a lack of skill in refusing a sale or a mistaken belief that refusing sale always results in a customer who never will return, which, if done often enough, might just pull the plug on all revenue. Appreciating the perspective is the only way we can start a dialogue that leads to an improved environment that we both can live within.

Alright, it even means finding the positive aspects of Bravo network, since the rest of the family seems rather enamored by it, and it's bound to be on in my home for some time to come. I'll start here: the stuff they make on Top Chef sure looks delicious. And I certainly do appreciate the talent of many of the competitors in each of the shows. If only they could let everyone around them be as brilliant as they are, recognizing that there's enough unlimited brilliance for everyone. Now, that would be fabulous.

Touching Home Base, or What I Learned at My High School Reunion

Some say that life happens in passages, and each passage – like chapters in a book of short stories – have their own unique plot lines. My life has certainly had distinct segments, each one occurring with its own unique cast of characters, locations, even careers.
So when I went back for my 30th high school reunion this past summer, I was truly walking back into another time and another place, and one that was many, many segments detached from the current chapter of my life. Nothing in my current life is the same as it was in 1978 except for the existence of my sisters, and even their involvement is limited – neither went to high school at the time that I did.

High school was a great segment of my life, and I threw myself into many activities – band, choir, theatre, the school newspaper – I even wrote for and edited the literary journal. But life didn’t end at high school graduation; it just changed. College was an entirely different set of experiences, and from there, each decade brought with it several major changes along with the new mailing addresses.

The reunion was actually for the entire decade of the seventies (making it my 32nd reunion, for those who are counting) and the committee had asked all of us who had performed in musicals throughout the decade to perform individually and as a choir. Not only was I walking into a room full of people I hadn’t seen in thirty-two years, but I had to sing “If I Were a Rich Man” from when I played Tevye in 1977. Would I be as good as I was then? Was I good then? I can’t remember. I mean, they clapped then for that 17 year-old pretending to be a Jewish man. But that could have been some anti-drug “support our youth” kind of thing.

I arrived back at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois – a northwest suburb of Chicago – an entirely different person. I was significantly older, greyer, heavier (unfortunately) -- I even had a new last name, which is another story for another time (though it was great fun telling people that I had a run in with the law in Reno). I had nothing to hang my head over in this homecoming – I had amassed a Ph.D., a great family, an amazing career, and plenty to prove that I had made the most of my life. If this was a test of how well we'd done since 1978, I was ready to pass with flying colors.

Lincolnshire had changed as well since 1978, as the city of Chicago had invaded the miles of our cornfields and quaint towns and had turned them into crowded subdivisions, corporate campuses, and endless strip malls. Even the school was different, having been renovated to four times its size -- a single hallway was the only flash from the past. Even the front doors had been moved. So neither of us were reuniting with the assumption that time had stopped.

Perhaps, I conjectured, this weekend would be some kind of time-travel experience, similar to what I had witnessed when alumni return to college homecoming games and act like 19-year-old idiots again (with 50-year-old livers). We'd all be transformed back to seventeen and have three magical days without debt, screaming bosses, or retirement funds to fret over. Sounded good -- a break from reality without psychosis is always nice.

Walking into the theatre for rehearsal (not the original theatre, as I had hoped, but a nice one nonetheless), I didn’t experience that magic transportation back in time, and (luckily) there was no one around taking score. Instead, I found something much better. I found a set of comrades who, like in the years of 1974 to 1978, were there to compare notes in solving the mystery of what it means to grow up. I found that all along this long road, I've had a home base.

We visited and sang and joked and hugged, and we spent most of our time catching up with each other on the many chapters of each other’s lives: marriages, children, divorces, degrees, careers, lost jobs, new cities, and second mortgages. High school was a distant memory, and no one was there to relive anything – we were here to check in with each other – to use our history as a way to touch home base before heading back out into the fray of our lives.

It didn’t matter what had happened thirty years ago. We who knew each other in the most fundamental ways were all together again. And this was different that any of the conversations I've had about life with many acquaintances over the years. These folks were with me from the beginning, as it were (and are there ever relationships that are closer than from this vantage point? Does anyone ever know us better than this?), and we were all experiencing the same unexpected view of our lives from our rear view mirrors, all looking to each other to hear, "I know -- me too."

Touching home base. It is, perhaps, one of the most profound experiences of life, the only way in which we are able to ground ourselves. How had I disregarded its power all these years, stuck in the hindered view of those around me now, at this moment, without context to guide them?

I also spent most of the time that weekend realizing that my seemingly diverse life passages weren’t so special after all – they were actually pretty typical. We had all struggled with our bodies getting old, our relationships having ups and downs, our finances ever changing, and our joys simple.

Most tender for us all at the moment was the shared loss of parents – some had gone, some were ill, others now lived miles away. And these stories bonded us most – they were a current connection that reminded us that we shared more than history. We each were walking a similar road. And it was important that we shared it with each other – that we checked in with one another to ensure that this, too, was a normal next step in the road.

The weekend ended with a memorial service for all those friends and teachers that had gone. Reading the list of names from my class to the group gathered in the commons, I realized that the power of “coming home” has little to do with proving myself or my choices over the decades. It was about confirming them; turning back to the same people who marvelled together about parents and pimples, sex and love, fears and futures – the only people who could truly understand the road travelled now to age and decline, victories and failures, life and death.

As I drove back to the airport, I realized that I had two profound blessings – an amazing privileged start to life with a dear set of friends, fellow travellers, and mentors, and now, a connection back to them that allowed us to walk through the rest of what life would bring. I had found home base. Perhaps I will never be able to g to it again, to touch it's familiar comfort. But I will never forget that it is there.

The CARTS Project

I bet it bothers you, too. You get to the parking lot of your favorite store and find the perfect parking space, only to see it unusable due to an errant cart or two taking the space.

Annoying, to be sure, but this bugs me for an entirely different reason.

President Obama is not the only one who thinks that we're losing our civility, and though leaving your shopping cart in the middle of the lot at Kroger doesn't seem worth the bother compared to the much more vivid examples of the civic decline that surround us each day. For me, these carts are a small reminder of our narcissistic modern nature, where we seem far more interested in our personal convenience than in the collective good.

But, as I've blogged about before (and will again and again), there's not much good in communicating merely about a problem. I'd rather envision a solution.

Here's mine: Every time I go to the store, I try to put one to three carts back in the parking lot cart rack nearest me.

I don't clean up the entire lot. I don't take them up to the store. That seems to be the minimum wage job of high school age employees, and I'd hate to deny them that pizza money. I just move a cart or two out from between the cars (or in the space where I had hoped to park) and place them in the collection rack where they belong.

Not a world changing action, certainly. And not much sweat off my brow either.

But imagine if every one of us did it. Imagine if every one of us thought about the next person who would be parking in that space. Imagine if we thought enough about our community store, and what experience shopping there meant for our community -- and what is said about us as a community? I don't need to imagine it -- I love when there's a clean parking lot with an open space to pull into. I love when I can walk around a neighborhood at night (the only time in Southeast Texas half the year when it's cool enough to walk) and never think twice about my safety. I love buying something from someone who I can trust isn't trying to rip me off. You get the idea.

Start small. One cart -- the one closest to (but not in) the cart collection rack. If you have an extra moment, stretch a bit and go for two -- that one way out that stands mid-space. I'll be doing the same.

And remember -- this could be the start of a whole new community.

We Are What We Communicate

Hurricane Ike was my first major hurricane. Being from Illinois (and living my first 47 years north of the Mason Dixon line, far from the Gulf of Mexico), I had little idea of what to expect beyond prime-time news clips.

Much of the actual event was exactly as I had seen on CNN for years: the relentless wind, of course, and the sideways, beating rain was just as predicted. I expected the power to go out (and it did), the humidity to be unbearable (and it was) and the ice to be worth more than gold (it came close).

What I didn't expect was the opportunity Ike gave me to get to know my neighbors.

Of course, I'd met most of them before, but there was never much to talk about. Things were relatively good in our neighborhood, and no big problems to fix, so why not just go inside to our own homes and watch a little cable TV?

But with no power, and broken trees everywhere, suddenly, there was a subject for ongoing conversation (and little else to distract it). Most was the typical interaction that occurs between survivors: where did you find a generator? How long did you wait to get gas? Did you see the electric company people come around this block yet? Did you see the roof damage on the house down the street?

We then moved quickly to the big issues that we shared as a neighborhood: a collective frustration with the power company, the forecasters, and life on the Gulf in general (especially as many of us were transplanted northerners who were merely tolerating Houston as the place where we made our money -- certainly not our "home"). And our collective complaining (along with our very uncomfortable houses) kept us out on the street and in conversation.

Yet, something else happened. Unable to create much change, we started enjoying each others company and looking for opportunities to connect -- using the problem as cheap excuse to interact, really. We had set up a large dinner party a few blocks up -- in one of the very few houses that had electricity restored quickly (lesson 1 in hurricane land: live close enough to a medical facility to be part of their grid). By the second week we had well over fifty people crammed together, sharing burgers, hot dogs, pizza, and whatever else could be mustered up from the limited supplies. Though I was delighted to get my electricity back by day 9, I did miss these nightly block parties (which we kept participating in -- as one of the "cooking" houses that had refrigeration and working appliances -- until day 13 when just about everyone had power).

The storm is a distant memory. The branches have all been picked up, trees have been replanted, roofs fixed. But even now, the neighborhood feels a little friendlier. The interaction has, of course, lessened, but it has not abated. People now stand out in their driveways to have conversations with their neighbors a little bit more often than they did before, wave to others a bit more, and watch out for the other a bit more.

Ever notice how "community" and "communication" have the same set of root words to express their concepts? Both words rely upon the "com" root which denotes "with" or "together" and "mun" which means "share." Community and communication are, quite literally, twin concepts with the same semiotic DNA; both are based upon the notion of "sharing together."

Community is truly dependent on communication and without it, much of community is unable to operate. Although we place a great deal (too much, perhaps) of emphasis on political leadership, the truth is that there's not much to lead without needs, interests, ideas, or desires being shared across all parties.

My hope is that this blog can help explore the many ways in which communication enhances community. I hope to write about a wide range of communication issues that impact community organizing, community visioning, community planning, and community change.

That last term, while very popular in social problem rhetoric, is for me the largest "problem" in our approach to community development. We're great at finding problems as the focus of our communication. Like in my experience with Ike, we use all that is wrong or unwanted in our experience as the motivation to communicate. Like they say -- misery loves company. And we are miserable -- too many of our neighborhood conversations are full of crime, substance abuse, teen delinquency, noisy neighbors, perverts, predators, and the unwanted.

Granted, these problems are real, but the satisfaction in our communication has little at all to do with the problem. Most who join social causes actually stay -- and work -- for the social satisfaction of interacting with others; it is the friendships and the camaraderie that we most adore.

But there's a deeper concern here for me, and that is the limited ability that problem-based talk has in actually helping make a better place to live. In the case of Ike, all our complaining did nothing to get our power back on any faster, or get the supplies we all needed back in the grocery stores and gas stations.

The issue surrounds our focus. When the majority of our communication focuses on the unwanted, there is little energy available to imagine the wanted. What kind of community do we want to live in? Surely, it is more than a community without crime, without substance abuse, without poverty, without noisy neighbors and all the rest.

What "problem" talk does, ultimately, is keep us focused on solutions rather than creations. We start making programs that solve the problem: a community watch program, a community alert system, a community

In fact, those problems, rather than serving as the focus of our energy, should inspire us to think and talk about what we'd like to be a community with. In other words, what is it that we envision filling our spaces and places, grabbing our attention, and serving as the focus of our collective lives? What we don't want gives us clues of what we do want -- a community with trust, a community with moderation, a community with abundance and shared resources, a community with mutual respect for one another.

Staying focused on the positive and on our vision of the ideal is often a conversation stopper. But it doesn't have to be. We just need to get into a new habit of talk, where we think about creating something even better rather than fixing something that is broken. Perhaps remembering that it is the human interaction that we most adore may help.

I firmly believe that we can create these vibrant communities, and can have sustained conversations --even energetic ones -- when we start to see our creations come to be: the new park where people can relax and play, the new family that we moved in, the neighborhood high school students that we collectively watched over and helped to succeed. The number of conversations -- and subsequent creations -- is endless.