Sad, but off base

Apparently a boy in Lee's Summit (the Kansas City side of Missouri) killed himself because he was being teased at school. This is sad, regretful, and I feel awful saying what I am about to say, but it needs to be said.

Like the 13 year-old girl locally who committed suicide because people made mean remarks to her via her MySpace page, we now have the boy who killed himself because the other kids at school were mean to him. Of course, his mother plans to sue the school. (Mind you if the public decides this is a silly suit, the lawyers will get blamed, not the member of the general public.)

Kids are vicious; anyone who survived grade school and high school can tell you that. Most of us get through it without suicide. Everyone should get through without feeling the need to kill themselves. We can feel sad when a child dies for any reason, especially when it is suicide related, but this cannot blind us to the fact that the child in this case died merely because someone was too mean to him. In life, people will be mean to you. It happens and people need to be able to deal with it.

In blaming the "them," (whether "them" is the evil, demon-possessed, other kids who did the "being mean" or the "teasing;" or whether "them" is the school which allegedly should have seen this coming and stopped it somehow, probably by creating the Biblical scale miracle of having kinds not torment the weaker, less popular, other kid); we allow ourselves to ignore any fault on the part of the child who is dead. After all, it seems cruel to us to blame the dead, especially when the dead is a child. Likewise, it seems cruel to blame the parents who we know must be mourning for the child. So we look elsewhere, because a tragedy like this makes us want to blame someone. Yet, logically if, as the parents are quoted on CNN, the school should have seen the problem and read the warning signs (and I'm certainly not saying the school is innocent), how much more true must this be of the parents? If the child had problems at home, how is this something that can be laid at the feet of the school? The school does not replace the parents and in the end, the buck stops with the parents. Of course, the parents can't emotionally admit fault and so, they blame the school. Human nature.

The bottom line is that no one should take their own life just because someone else was mean to them. The person who made the conscious choice, however young they may be, is the one who could have stopped the incident from happening, should have stopped it from happening. That person ALONE is most at fault for the (usually) fundamentally selfish act of suicide, and therein, however tragic, lies the blame.

My final thought is this. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and let the person who never tormented anyone, was never mean to another kid, who never made another miserable during their entire K-12 experience be the one to cast this first stone. Before you blame the school or the mean other kids, look in the mirror. Take a long, hard, look. How many can say it was never I?