Teach Your Children Well

Nineteen-year-old Alyssa Funke, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, bought a shotgun, drove to her family's boat, and killed herself there on April 14. Students at her former high school had outed her as the star of a "casting couch" porn video, and her parents say the subsequent online harassment contributed to her suicide.

Funke, a straight-A student, did her first and only porn video—for the amateur site CastingCouch-X—earlier this year. She used the name Stella Ann, and talked with the cameraman about the sports she played in high school, her biology major, and her goal of becoming an anesthesiologist. She was 18 at the time.

The National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center estimates that nearly 30 percent of American youth are either a bully or a target of bullying. However, bullying is no longer a problem that is isolated to the playgrounds, hallways and lunch rooms of schools across the United States. Instead, advances in technology have now extended harassment to cell phones, social media websites and other online avenues that are contributing to an alarming number of suicides.

A meme doing the rounds on Facebook and twitter lately:
The best thing about being over 40 is that we did all of our stupid stuff before the internet.

Yeah, tell me about it, baby! I am mondo grateful that the internet and cell phone cams were just sci fi concepts when I was a teen.

I was lucky.

I did some tremendously inane, reckless and embarrassing shit, just like all adolescents. I got bullied to hell and back in part for my indiscretions but maybe more because I was different.

I didn’t fit into any of the small, rural, western Pennsylvania high school cliques. I wasn’t a cheerleader or baton twirler type. Though reasonably bright, I wasn’t terribly bookish. I didn’t have the self confidence to survive the thespian crew, though I loved building and painting sets. And the art teacher made it clear that I wasn’t welcome to hang out with her and her select group of student artists. I was sorta kinda involved with gymnastics but DEF not a jock by any means. I was barely, disdainfully tolerated in the music department.

Lovely. Without a posse of my own, I was quite the target for the myriad mean girls.

My parents, who were absorbed in dealing with other more obviously troubled siblings, were unhelpful. When I was desperately unhappy enough to ask them for help, when I felt I just couldn’t take the bullying any longer, my mother tossed off a quick "they tease you because they like you."

What a thoughtless, unfeeling, steaming cauldron of Godzilla excrement.

When I pressed my folks, saying "no, no, that ain't it," they said "ignore them and they'll go away."

They didn't.

I knew then that, yup, I was on my own and alone. These nasty ass girls and boys could harass and abuse me into a grave and no one would be stepping in to help me.

Got it.

What I understood even more keenly, was that I had to survive. I had my out out date, graduation day, and hunkered down to wait the assholes out.

I made it. Alyssa Funke, Ryan Halligan, Megan Meier, Jessica Logan, Tyler Clementi, Amanda Todd and countless others did not.

There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Teach Your Children Well — Crosby, Stills and Nash