In the book Love > Hate, the ultimate strategy to end bullying is revealed. The author, Brooks Gibbs, explains the proven solution for teens and adults to stop one of the biggest issues in America. The author’s writing drives you into a deep ocean of thoughts and emotions that occur inside a bullying victim’s head.
Reading through this book I fully realized how severe bullying really is and it helped that the author had his own experience with this issue. Middle school is when it became a problem for Brooks. Without any friends, strong family figures, and the same learning level as other students, he was a big target for bullies. Seeking so badly for love from peers, family, and others since bullies and his alcoholic dad were all he knew, Brooks went down the wrong route. Eventually, he found himself hanging with his so called “friends” doing drugs, drinking, stealing, etc. He was arrested for breaking into a car and stealing items from it, realizing he couldn’t live like his life like that, he reached the lowest point in his life. Losing his “friends”, he finally got to a state of depression where he would cut his wrists to deal with pain, feeling like he was going to die.
With the weight of the world on Brooks’ shoulders he finally had the courage to confess about drugs, alcohol, bullying, and everything else to his mother. His mother then told him how to deal with bullies, a method that actually works. Reinforcing the Golden Rule and Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she told Brooks the only way to get rid of hate is simply to match it with love. It doesn’t matter if it is verbal, cyber, or physical bullying this solution works. If someone expresses something hurtful and mean toward you, all you do is show kindness and love back; they then have no reason to hate you. Fighting fire with fire will never work, and this is a perfect example. If hate and hate fight back and forth it will only cause more hate. When you add love into the mix, there is no way hate can win because love can always be greater than hate.
Mastering the skill of showing love and kindness towards hate can often be a challenge, that’s why Brook’s explains that you have to do it hundred percent of the time. So how can our school and schools around the country do a better job of enforcing no bullying? Well, I think this is just it. We need to reinforce the Golden Rule to teach students how to deal with bullying. Not only will this solve most issues but students don’t need to feel like “snitches” or “tattletales” by filling out a bully report and maybe attracting more anger from that bully. By revealing this solution, students could take the responsibility of stopping bullying. It won’t have to be the teachers dealing with mean girls and fights in the hallways; instead it can be our own student body.
A lot of times bullying occurs from teens who want to be cool, fit in, have issues at home, etc. But is finding negatives in someone and digging deep into their core to fill them with anger and sadness really all worth it? Calling people names including your friends and family, is bullying. Laughing when someone makes a mistake, that’s bullying too. Thinking your better than someone else because of what they wear and/or have interest in, it’s all bullying. So instead of judgments, stereotypes, name calling, and everything else in between, we need to feed America what it has starved for every day; Love.
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