Taylor Swift - Mean
I found a story from our news that truely struck a chord of moral outrage in me; it was regarding an episode of Cyber Bullying, where a bully (or rather two) built a Facebook page with the name and birth date of another person, and used the page to taunt and tease this person about her weight and alleged lack of intelligence. This story of bullying is especially hurtful, since everyone could see the posts and mean comments that were coming from this one Facebook page. A picture of a cow was set as the profile picture, and crude insults regarding her weight filled the page. At first she didn’t know how to react, but Ally Pfeiffer choose to fight back. After reporting to the police, and bringing them clues, Ally was approached by an old friend, who asked her to drop the charges; he had ganged up with another girl from their high school to try and humiliate Ally because “they were bored.” Ally was less than shocked to learn that her friend had betrayed and tried to hurt her. She told the Today Show, “I gave myself one day to cry after I found out about it and I decided I have to work for myself from here on out. My mission is to help other teens. I want to help anyone I can.” The two are now facing charges of criminal impersonation, conspiracy, and harassment. Intentional humiliation and harm are two very wrong things, and the recent increase in such events really bothers me. I feel that Cyber Bullying is worse than “in-person” bullying, since it is unavoidable. When a bully is a real-life person that you must face daily, you can prepare and try and avoid any attacks, but with a Cyber Bully, not only are you unprotected, but you don’t really know who is bullying you, so you can’t pin anything on anyone. Cyber Bullying makes me mad because it shows that the bully has enough problems of it’s own that it can’t handle doing anything in person. This aggravates me because an insecure person is harassing another insecure person when really, they could be working together to push through the hard things in life that they have to face.
Cyber Bullying is not addressed in Dante’s Inferno, obviously because the internet was not inexistence at the time, and also because bullying could be considered one of many different sins seen throughout Hell. Cyber Bullying is most definitely unique to our modern society, but the general bully, I’m sure, has been in existence for a much longer time. Strangely enough, I found Bullying to be most like Hypocrites seen in Bolgia Six of the Eighth Circle in Dante’s Hell. Bullies are like hypocrites in that they pretend to be perfect and have the right to point out the flaws in others. Bullies use the imperfections of others to distract from their own flaws, just as one might call another an “overachiever” to distract from their own slacking and underachievement. I do think that Dante would see and acknowledge my argument, but I think that if he lived in this day and age, there would be a specific place designated for those who have bullied to a great extent, causing more than minimal harm to others. I think that the location of this place could be in many different areas, but most likely it would be near the Violent Against Their Neighbors and the Hypocrites. So, I think that Dante and I would be in agreement that there is a need for a special place for bullies. The pain that these people cause is not the extent of their crime; these people are liars in that they pretend to be flawless themselves and violent in that they are harmful.
Information gathered from http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local-beat/Bristol-Woman-Fights-Back-After-Cyber-Bullying-111520759.html
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