Another Pink Shirt Day, with efforts to end bullying and create a kinder society where every child feels safe, has come and gone.
Pink Shirt Day started in 2007 after two students at a Nova Scotia school decided to do something positive when they witnessed another student being bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. They purchased pink shirts and began distributing them to students. The next day, hundreds showed up wearing pink in a show of solidarity with the person who had been bullied.
Today, Pink Shirt Day has become a worldwide movement. On Feb. 22, people in many countries around the world celebrated diversity and showed support for making schools and workplaces bully-free zones.
It is a good bet there were anti-bullying activities at area schools and possibly some workplaces.
Sadly, it is also a good bet that in the days following Pink Shirt Day, there were incidents of bullying – not just a child excluded from a schoolyard game or taunted for “being different,” but a young worker at a drive-thru yelled at because something went wrong with a customer’s gift card payment (as if having no money left on the card were the worker’s fault!), an employee berated in front of others for incompetence by a supervisor notorious for doing things like that, or a senior citizen who had the living daylights scared out of them by an over-mouthed and under-brained driver having an adverse reaction to sharing the road. The list goes on.
Bullying has long been thought of as a schoolyard phenomenon. It is not. The schoolyard bullies who made our lives miserable in grade school eventually grew up – or at least, grew into adulthood. A few may have learned at some point to play nice in the sandbox, or even developed some empathy. However, the proliferation of internet trolls and grocery store screamers indicates bullying is as much a blight on the adult world as it is a grade school menace. The grade school bully simply graduates from taunting classmates and stealing lunch money, to harassing coworkers and shouting insults at people wearing head scarves or turbans – or pink shirts.
In fact, adult bullying seems to have gained new… call it acceptability, or at the very least, momentum, in recent years. It may have something to do with confusing freedom of speech with lipping off at all and sundry, or the ease with which one can accomplish the latter via computer. And it certainly does not help that bullies have some very high-profile role models.
Kids have been known to cyberbully a classmate to the point where the victim takes their own life. It is a particularly vicious form of bullying because it follows the victim into their own home. There is no escaping it.
We must keep in mind that the person who cyberbullied Amanda Todd from ages 12 to 15 when she took her own life, was an adult.
The internet is crawling with adults who use social media to harass and bully. Spewing venom at famous people has become a particularly disturbing trend in recent years. And the perpetrators are not kids.
The adult world has homophobic and racist rants that masquerade as comedy, and venomous and blatant lies that are treated as valid news.
In other words, we as a society may wear pink shirts, but we do not walk the talk.
Our kids learn from us, and not all of what they learn is positive. Pink Shirt Day is a reminder that we, their parents, have some learning to do, too. If it takes a pink shirt to draw attention to the fact that racist, sexist, homophobic or simply cruel words and actions are wrong, that they hurt people whether they are written (with multiple exclamation marks and block capitals) on social media, shouted at a hockey referee or uttered with the intent to demean anyone, adult or child, then bring it on.
Every wardrobe could use more pink.
