More than a hundred, maybe 200, mingled outside Confectionately Yours on a muggy Sunday morning. To celebrate a life. To make a statement.
Emily Murillo took her own life. Drove into a canal. To drown the pain. She was bullied. But that’s not quite right. “Bullying,” as Emily’s mother Erin Murillo told the crowd, is not the correct word. It’s “too gentle of a word to describe what it really means. It's harassment, it's intimidation, it's an invasion.”
She asked the crowd to consider the “lessons of Emmy’s too short life,” lessons that “will not only help bring awareness to the unbearable pain caused by bullying, but lead to real and lasting change to the way the schools, young people, the greater community treat those people who are different.”
And change we must. Federal data paints a bleak picture. One in five students aged 12-18 report being bullied. One in five. Other studies report higher numbers.
The impact of bullying on victims is both physical and emotional, and can be part of the complex web of issues that result in teen suicide. Victims of this kind of harassment and intimidation, federal Department of Health and Human Services, often describe feeling “Depression and anxiety, increased feelings of sadness and loneliness, changes in sleep and eating patterns, and loss of interest in activities they used to enjoy. These issues may persist into adulthood.”
While HHS warns that the “relationship between bullying and suicide is complex,” it is fairly clear that “persistent bullying can lead to or worsen feelings of isolation, rejection, exclusion, and despair, as well as depression and anxiety, which can contribute to suicidal behavior.”
This is all very clinical, of course. The reality of bullying is not clinical, but direct and damaging. I suffered some bullying as a kid. It left me feeling helpless, especially at a time when it was not discussed and the solution offered was to “man up” or “stand up for yourself.” The bullies rarely faced real punishment and the victims were left even more vulnerable.
We know more now, but that does not seem to matter. We spent four years with a president who encouraged attacks on the most vulnerable, who called on his supporters to intimidate and harass critics, who even said he’d pay the bail of someone if they knocked out a protester. We have a news station that is considered mainstream that has essentially mainstreamed bullies like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. Immigrants, ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, women, the LGBTQ+ community, the poor, the weak, students and adults with special needs — these are the targets.
These troglodytes are not responsible for creating the culture of bullying and intimidation — that has a longstanding history — but they do foster it.
Murillo’s call for change is, in many ways, a revolutionary statement. Historically, American society has feared difference, even made it illegal, with vice squads policing sex and sexual difference (which it dubbed deviance), with police and other public officials policing the separation of the races in the South (and banks and other entities doing it up north), with police even now focusing their crack downs on Black and Brown neighborhoods and Border Patrol and ICE chasing immigrants into the shadows.
I may be off topic a bit. And perhaps I am making this seem unnecessarily political. But politics plays into this, as does the culture of sports, the language of power, and our inability to recognize and respect difference. Bullying is about intimidation and control, about brutalizing others — verbally, physically, digitally on social media. The bully chooses the person he or she sees as weakest or most disconnected from the larger group, preys on the weak and the outcast, because the weak and the outcast are viewed as unable to respond. The bully counts on this, counts on the victim’s isolation and fear. The victim cannot fight back, the bully thinks, because the victim is weak. The victim cannot unite with others, because the victim is alone.
To defeat the bully, then, we have to break down the barriers that keep the bullied from speaking up. We have to take their fears and their words seriously. And we have to find ways to unite them with each other and with allies who are willing to stand up and stop the intimidation.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” said Frederick Douglass. And if bullying is about power, and about establishing hierarchies of power, then we have to stand together to demand that our elected officials — council members, school board members, state legislators, and members of Congress — do what needs to be done. We need to demand that the culture of bullying, of intimidation, of violence end.