“If there’s one goal of this conference,” President Obama said at the White House today during a conference on bullying, “it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up.” Well, it’s definitely not harmless, but it probably is inevitable. While the Internet has provided America’s douchiest youths with new tools with which to torment their prey, bullying has gone on probably since caveman days, when children with subtle foreheads and thin beards would be pelted with rocks and abandoned by society. Even President Obama himself was bullied, he noted today.
And look at him now. He is so traumatized by the taunts about his ears that he regularly makes self-deprecating jokes about them himself on national television, and so scarred is he from being mocked for his funny name that he made the insult a key line in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that won over America and propelled him to the White House. Now do you see what bullying does to people???
Barack Obama bullied over his name and big ears [Telegraph UK]
Obama to bullying victims: I know what it’s like [AP]
