Posted on 03/28/2018 10:34:45 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
PARKLAND, Fla. — My first interaction with Nikolas Cruz happened when I was in seventh grade. I was eating lunch with my friends, most likely discussing One Direction or Ed Sheeran, when I felt a sudden pain in my lower back. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of my 90-pound body; tears stung my eyes. I turned around and saw him, smirking. I had never seen this boy before, but I would never forget his face. His eyes were lit up with a sick, twisted joy as he watched me cry.
The apple that he had thrown at my back rolled slowly along the tiled floor. A cafeteria aide rushed over to ask me if I was O.K. I don’t remember if Mr. Cruz was confronted over his actions, but in my 12-year-old naïveté, I trusted that the adults around me would take care of the situation.
Five years later, hiding in a dark closet inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I would discover just how wrong I was.
I am not writing this piece to malign Nikolas Cruz any more than he already has been. I have faith that history will condemn him for his crimes. I am writing this because of the disturbing number of comments I’ve read that go something like this: Maybe if Mr. Cruz’s classmates and peers had been a little nicer to him, the shooting at Stoneman Douglas would never have occurred.
This deeply dangerous sentiment, expressed under the #WalkUpNotOut hashtag, implies that acts of school violence can be prevented if students befriend disturbed and potentially dangerous classmates. The idea that we are to blame, even implicitly, for the murders of our friends and teachers is a slap in the face to all Stoneman Douglas victims and survivors.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We’ve met your friends. Cruz wasn’t crazy at all.
The title says she “tried to befriend” Cruz but the text disagrees completely. Sitting down with someone for one single hour because you needed to to fulfill an assignment does not constitute “befriending”.
She didn’t try to befriend him at all, and it’s becoming clear that neither did anyone else at the school, or anywhere else. And I begin to suspect that Hogg and Gonzales made themselves the faces of the event to cover up for their own actions in worsening the situation.
Was David Hogg one of the bullies?
This was apparent from the first words out of Hogg’s mouth. He is deeply culpable as a veteran bully.
Most school administrations are useless as a screen door on a submarine. The only thing they understand is lawsuits and or political pressure. They talk a great game about bullying but when it comes down to it they will back the bully every time unless the issue is pressed extremely hard.
I dealt with bullies with my children twice, once on a bus when a kid broke my sons glasses on purpose. I called the principal and he immediately started the song and dance about the kids home life and I cut him short and asked is this bullying yes or no? Yes, then do something about it or I will, my son will stomp this little punk tomorrow with my blessing. Oh we can’t have fighting he exclaimed! You already have aggression happening on one side I said, tomorrow you will get it from both sides. You better do something now. He kicked the kid off the bus for the rest of the year. The kid apologized to my kid and left him alone.
My daughter got caught up in a high school social media drama by essentially befriending a girl who was very poor and had few friends. One girl decided to harass this poor girl on social media and because my daughter had befriended her she got attacked and told to back off and my daughter to her credit told the little jerk, you don’t pick my friends and so she started in on my daughter. I knew the principal and showed him the evidence and he dithered a bit. A year earlier this same thing happened to a male student on social media and nothing was done and lies were told and this poor kid got beaten to a pulp.
So I let him know up front, deal with this immediately or I will pull my daughters uncle who is a cop into this and seek restraining orders, take legal action and take you and administration out of the equation altogether. He dealt with it and it stopped all the way around, my daughter and her friend. You have to literally force school administrators to do their jobs where bullying is involved they just will not do the right thing, they won’t.
This doesn’t read like it was written by a 17 yr old. Not the content, the writing style.
Two years old, but can’t help but think this is somehow mashed in with a total breakdown in true law enforcement activity in the Miami area (PROMISE program?)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-new-broward-mayor-20161122-story.html
A great letter. It does seem, however, to be written in a manner which a more mature person than an HS Senior would be capable of. Perhaps her parents helped her.
No matter whether she authored it alone or with assistance, she is correct. The constant idea that these homicidal maniac students were bullied is an easy excuse to answer the “why?”. It also places blame upon the victims.
Several years ago a student entered Rocori HS in Cold Spring, Minnesota and shot and killed two fellow students. The blame game about bullying was brought forth. I remember thinking, “are these folks who are saying this blaming the 2 dead boys who will never came home that day, will never celebrate another birthday, who will not get to go to college, be a father, uncle, etc”?
It is the ultimate abuse of victims to turn the spotlight on supposed bullying when someone goes beserk and starts shooting up the place.
What's important about this article is that is blows away the lefts' mindless trope that 'society creates monsters'; that criminals are 'victims of society' and the solution is to 'fix' society (generally with an endless stream of liberal 'feel good' programs like not reporting dangerous students to the police to keep them out of the 'school to prison pipeline'.)
The author clearly saw Cruz as violent and a threat and she wanted adults to 'do something'.
The adults didn't do anything because they operated on the liberal theory Cruz was somehow a victim of a violent, unjust, uncaring society and society is the problem.
The solution, they have been repeatedly told, was not to call him out because to do so would label him for life as a troublemaker which would set him on a path to prison.
No adults intervened because that would stigmatize him and in doing so he would be deprived of options, set-up for life-long failure, and without options, driven by an uncaring society to be destined for the criminal justice system; the school to prison pipeline.
Go to the piece and read the comments.
Liberals, when forced to confront their own liberal theories such as 'society is to blame', don't even believe their own liberal 'feel-good' theories and lies.
Whatever drove Cruz to do what he did, poor parenting, exposure to violence, mental illness, genetic predetermination to violence, and yes, even the influences of social pressures and conditions, someone should have intervened.
They didn't intervene because, in their minds, they 'cared' about him enough not to intervene, not to label him a monster and send him down the pipeline to prison.
In trying to 'save' one, 17 innocent people died.
Society is not to blame. Liberal theories are to blame.
Back in the day, that's what shut the bullies down -- getting their asses thoroughly kicked.
Hogg’s cousin was part of a setup?
Where did you find this?
It's equally likely he would have benefited from someone beating the shit out of him and putting the fear of God into the little crapweasel.
Exactly. A good ass-kicking actually helps a lot of people.
This is the girl who should have been the Parkland spokesman, not those two twits who are out there grabbing any bit of limelight that the DNC can arrange for them.
She has common sense, she expresses herself coherently and very effectively, and she says exactly what Trump was saying: we need maniac control. And a lot of “maniacs” start to show it when they are very young.
He’s the bully, they’re the bully, everyone’s the bully! The school, police and fbi did nothing. He decided it was better to kill people, rather than leave the school and make a better life for himself. There are so many things wrong with what happened.
So, Cruz chucked an apple at her with absolutely no provocation at all.
I find that the start of the story is really not the start. Did this kid normally come into the cafeteria and just start throwing fruit at tables?
If you read the documentation on what goes through the heads of these whack-job shooters is that they generally have a long term problem that includes bullying and public humiliation.
The kid misses the points:
1. No one says that you have to be his friend. You don’t even have to acknowledge him. You just need to NOT be an asshole to them.
2. If this girl was a peer counselor to this kook, and she was frightened—she is a moron for staying in the same room as him.
I had not argument whatsoever with what you said, nor did I disagree. You made a valid statement. Therefore I didn’t think I needed to comment on it. I was after all just remarking on how the press operates to deflect from the issue raised by another student that they didn’t really want to discuss. That being the cause & effect of school shootings. It isn’t the guns, but rather a student who reaches their limit and acts out violently as a result. They either shoot up their classmates or they take their own life.
Dozens of complaints were reported. Probably hundreds of complaints went unreported, like this one.
Thank you, Sheriff Israel for putting racial quotas ahead of public safety. I hope you and Attorney General Holder are really proud of not stopping Cruz because he wasn’t white.
That would not surprise me at all. Everything in this story points to them wanting this to happen.
That Emma Gonzalez girl screamed “You didn’t know this guy! You don’t know why we ostracized him!”
So she’s basically one reason why he did it.
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