Where Are We Going?

This is for all of you who are worried about slippery slopes and inevitable doom and moral decay.  This if for all of you who are actually worried about the direction of our culture.  This is for those of you who swear that those "old" days really were good.  I could talk about a lot of things: slavery, women's suffrage, witch trials, wars of religion, but I'm not, I'm going to talk about a change that has taken place somewhere between the time when I was a kid and the present.  I'm going to talk about something that I read yesterday on a funny website, but I'm not going to link to it, because I wouldn't want my kids to read it (bad words), and honestly, I really want them to be able to read the rest of this.  I want them to read it because I want them to know and see that somehow, someway their world is better than the one I grew up in.  I want them to see that human progress can be about more than iphones.
I'm going to talk about bullies.  I'm going to admit that I was bullied as a kid, and I'm also going to admit, perhaps even more painfully, that I was a bully.  No, I never beat someone up for their lunch money or shoved some kid in a locker, but I used words to intimidate, I made fun of people for how they looked or dressed or who they hung around with.  I sometimes got into fights, but I always felt like they were necessary, but mostly they were just stupid.  The gory details of growing up in the 1980's are something I would rather leave to the past, but I do want to let the younglings know something: bullies were a thing.  You can see it in almost every movie from my childhood and adolescence, from Stand By Me to The Karate Kid, to Back to the Future, to my beloved Star Wars  (come on, Vader and the Emperor were like the ultimate bullies, they blew up a whole freaking planet).
There's something inherently story-worthy about an underdog standing up to a bully, whether it's Marty McFly or Luke Skywalker, but the thing about growing up in the 1980's was that the only place the bullies lost was in the movies.  You want to know the best advice most of us got about how to deal with bullies was: "ignore them."  It came from parents and teachers and guidance counselors.  I don't think they really thought this through.  It's really hard to ignore someone who randomly punches you in the back of the head while you're trying to get stuff out of your locker.  It's even harder to ignore someone who is making fun of you in front of all your peers (yes that is often worse than getting punched in the back of the head).  But don't fight back, and don't tell on them!
Looking back, I think it was a transitional phase in human consciousness.  We had moved past the era of English boarding schools and prisons where brutality and shame were seen as the basic tools by which character was formed, but we had not gotten past the old systemic blind eye and the abhorrence of tattling or snitching.  Teachers and principals could not be counted on to intervene when some freak of the pituitary gland decided you looked at him funny.  If overt violence broke out there would be consequences, no matter who was the aggressor, because quite frankly it seemed like just too much police work for grown adults to try and figure out if you punched a kid in the nose in self defense or whether you were in fact the bully.  That's one of the reasons why the Karate Kid, despite being a kind of stupid movie, was so hugely popular, because the bullied kid was able to get his justice within the sanction of a martial contest, not in the parking lot behind the gymnasium.
In the movies, violence was the answer. In real life, violence got you suspended.  This was a difficult lesson to learn, and again the adults didn't seem to have a good answer for it, so this ill considered pacifism was recommended, because again the grownups assumed that bullies had some basic decency.  Which proved that they had pretty much forgotten all about their childhood.  But by no means were you to "tell," and even if you did, you would probably not get much help, because the system was staffed by people who had grown up with bullies and who had probably been bullied at some point, and rather than finding it an abhorrent example of human awfulness, decided it should fall into the "that's just how things are" category.
I don't fault them too much, because honestly that is just how things are or rather how they are if you don't do anything about it.  For whatever reason, when people my age started to become parents and teachers, we collectively and sort of unconsciously decided that enough was enough, and as grown ups we decided to start to do something about bullies.  We stopped being accessories to the bullying at the very least.  We tried to recognize that that weird, awkward kid actually deserved to get home with out his underwear being pulled halfway up his back or having his head flushed in a toilet.  In almost all the cinematic bully stories there is at least one adult who is a silent accomplice, if not an outright sadist bent on tormenting a child.
My kids go to schools with a "zero tolerance" policy on bullying.  This doesn't just mean that every pugnacious maladjusted little brute ends up in constant trouble, it means that all the kids learn from a very early age what bullying is and that they ought not to do it.  If you want to bring my eleven year old to the brink of tears tell him he's being a bully.  It's like the worst thing you can say to him, because he's grown up in a world where it's not okay to be one.  He's been told that being mean to other kids is not right, and he's been shown that there are consequences and he's been supported by teachers and parents and whole system that said, "No, bullies are not just the way it is."
Does this mean that bad behavior stops?  No, I'm quite sure it doesn't.  I know that a lot of the bullying has moved to more sophisticated forms and migrated out of the locker rooms and on to Facebook (or whatever social media actual kids use these days).  I honestly do believe that bullying as social posturing is practically unavoidable.  What I am at least a little proud of is that we have collectively and rather efficiently taught a couple of generations of kids that we are not going to call it good any more.  What's more we have shown them that we can aim a little higher than acting like Snape does with Draco Malfoy, which is to say, only giving a hoot about bullying when he absolutely has to.
It shouldn't really be that surprising that actual grown-ups can make a difference in how kids behave.  I know we spent years living with the myth that grown-ups were stupid, but that was exactly like the myth that violence solves problems (maybe we grown-ups ought to look into that next).
My point in all this is that we have the ability to make progress on things that seem unchangeable.  We can combat bullying and racism and all kinds of nonsense, not by magically making people not be bullies or racists, but by simply constructing a system that consistently and firmly says, "No, that is not okay."
Don't tell me things can't change for the better, I've seen it happen.
Sin is still a thing to be sure, and nothing is ever going to be perfect, but the point is we can get better, and that, at least should be evidence that we should keep trying.