Bullying is a joke

Jay McGraw, the son of trusted TV psychologist Dr. Phil, informed me of something earth-shattering this afternoon. Did you know that over 50 percent of kids are bullied in schools today? What, you say you didn't know that? Well, guess what neither did I.
Now this could be because we all have our heads buried in the sand or because we just don't care, or (and this is a big or) this statistic could seem incredibly big because it's wrong! Yeah, that's right I said it, this is wrong; I mean think about it, 50 percent, really?

The focus of the October 28 episode of Dr. Phil was cyber bullying and while I admit that I learned a little bit about how crappy some peoples lives are and how crazy some people are, the whole show was just really a joke to me.

Now, I will admit that I haven't really dealt with bullying much in my life and maybe I'm just blissfully ignorant, but the whole show seemed ridiculous.

Dr. Phil kept trying to push what a problem this issue is in America, and to do that he brought on his son, (the weird one that he drags out whenever he needs a hip, fresh point of view because he knows that he can't connect with teens the way his good-looking son can.) And while I wouldn't have minded listening to Jay McGraw yammer on about how much of a problem bullying is and his new book, Jay McGraw's Life Strategies for Dealing with Bullies, which releases today by the way, it got to a point where the show was so kooky I couldn't even handle it.

The truth is that very few people are bullied in a severe sense of the word, and there really aren't that many extreme bullies in the world. Yeah, we're all jerks sometimes and we all say things that we don't necessarily mean, but that doesn't constitute us as bullies. Honestly, I can think of only a handful of experiences from my 12 years of schooling that could qualify as bullying, and even then it wasn't severe in the least.

Now, this is not to say that I don't acknowledge that there are kids out there who are bullied relentlessly by mean-spirited people for no apparent reason. But seriously, that's rare to say the least. We all have our own cliques in high school and while you might vaguely murmur about how one is weird, they're doing the same thing back to you, and if you're phased by this in the least, then maybe you don't have the guts it takes to make it in the real world.

Here's just what I think it comes down to: we over dramatize things today. We find a few severe cases of bullying and we plaster them over shows like Dr. Phil to make problems seem worse than they are. And if we're manipulating ideas and views, isn't that just perpetuating the problem?