Pink Shirt Day is Over – Thank God

Pink Shirt Day is Over – Thank God

It did feel good. So many people, victims and bullys, professional athletes, politicians, and celebrities, some of whom are professional bullies; all wearing pink shirts to show their empathy for the bullied.

But thank God Pink Shirt Day is over and we can get back to normal.

Yes, now that we’ve wrestled bullying to the ground, we can resume day-to-day behaviour.

We can go back to bossing our spouses and children around, ignoring them altogether, or belittling them when we feel the need.

We can intimidate and ridicule workplace colleagues.

We can go back to cheering Judge Judy’s berating of stupid defendants, to idolizing hockey goons, to watching Donald Trump intimidate fading celebrity apprentices, or Gordon Ramsay swearing at feckless chef trainees.

Instead of phoning CKNW to join the Pink Shirt Day empathy Olympics, we can now resume phoning to support the government’s bullying of teachers or the teachers bullying of the government.

We can listen to Don Cherry glorifying Canadian toughness and questioning the manhood of European players, whose names he purposely mispronounces.

We can continue to demand that people “grow a pair”, “man up”, or “suck it up” when faced with poverty, hardship, or infirmity.

We can once again complain to anyone who’ll listen that we’re working hard but those other guys, especially if they’re union and/or if their situation is better than ours, need to “wake up and smell the coffee” or “get with the real world”.

Yes, fighting bullying is simple. Wear a pink shirt once a year and spend a day or two claiming empathy and demanding that bullying stop here.

Wearing a pink shirt for a day once a year should make bullies think twice before they emulate behaviours modeled by parents, sports heroes, the workplace, popular culture, and even the founder of Pink Shirt Day, Christy Clark.

And I’m sure that Pink Shirt Day will convince school prinicipals and teachers to finally stop ignoring bullying all the time and do something about it.

But one day of empathy is plenty; the point’s been made – thank God it’s all over.

So; bullying’s fixed – what problem should we address now?

Oh, and I know some people who didn’t wear pink shirts on Wednesday – we took names … they’ll be sorry if they don’t wear pink next year.

Tortured tweeners struggling for self-esteem are not the problem; they are a manifestation of the problem.

As Simon in the Lord of the Flies observed,

“ Maybe there is a beast…I mean, maybe it’s only us…”