The response was predictable, and in its way, reassuring.
Since a video of 68-year-old school bus monitor Karen Klein being harassed by four 7th grade students during a field trip on the last day of classes went viral a week ago, the upstate New York grandmother of eight has received an outpouring of support from the public, which has led to an otherwise horrible story having a (somewhat) happy ending. Klein has not only received a cool half-million from an impromptu donation fund set up on her behalf so she can take a vacation, but apologies have come in from both the parents of the children and at least two of the children themselves. All four of the kids received a year's suspension from school for their behavior, as well as community service sentences.
Good. The video is distressing to say the least: nearly ten minutes of relentless harassment by these four little shits, throughout which it is evident Mrs. Klein wants to explode, to lash out, to put her tormentors in their place, but trembling with rage, hot tears burning their way down her face, she remains composed, stays the course as the resident adult on the bus, the one responsible for the safety of these kids (and that's what they are, no matter how rude and foul-mouthed).
She really does deserve a vacation.
I can't say I never gave teachers grief when I was that age. I'm sure there were plenty of grown-ups working in my school system back then who thought I too was a 'little shit'... I was a showman in my own mind, a clown, delighted in sauntering proudly out the door to the chuckles and chortles of my classmates after some carefully craffted jackass behavior left a flustered (usually substitute, but not always) teacher no alternative other than to command me out of the classroom.
Yes, I was that kid. But I could never have conceived of doing what the kids in this video do to Karen Klein. I never got personal, or cruel, never told a teacher of any kind to 'shut the fuck up' or called anyone fat or threatened to do bodily harm. It never occurred to me that such behavior was possible. It simply wasn't an option.
Karen Klein deserves more than a vacation for how she handled things. Maybe the Nobel Prize, for exhibiting a level of restraint that would make the man of Galilee proud.
But there were kids back in my childhood that would have done that, kids I remember with unsettlingly clarity who had it in them to be that cruel, that obnoxious...the kids that - 'little shit' though I may have been - I crept down back hallways and burst through back doors in a full-tilt run for the woods behind the school in order to avoid when the end of the day came. In other words, there have always been bad kids, 'rotten apples', as Mrs. Klein has described at least two of her tormentors, so although it's an understandable conclusion to draw, I don't believe the incident is endemic to our times, a representation of what our 'children have become.'
What I find disturbing is that amidst all the outrage, which has reached as far up the media ladder as Matt Lauer and Anderson Cooper, nothing has been said - not one word - about the real offense here (what I'd wager was at least part of the reason Karen Klein was as upset as she was): not the cruelty itself so much as the fact that throughout the ordeal a camera was trained on her face, documenting the incident, and that within a day or two it was uploaded and being viewed by thousands or more people - published, for all practical purposes - and that it will remain out there for the world to see whenever someone wants to, as easily accessible to watch on a moment's notice as the flag raising at Iwo Jima, the Beatles arrival in America, the Rodney King beating or myriad other incidents that, unlike this, and for better or worse, warranted some documentation. No matter where she chooses to go for her vacation, Karen Klein has to live with that video being out there. She has to live with her face being the face of an humiliating story for the rest of her days, her pitiable (if understandable) tears exposed to - literally - the entire world.
That is perverse.
Had I been in her predicament, I am pretty sure I could have ignored the rude comments. I like to think I'm mature enough not to let myself get into a verbal pissing match with a middle schooler.
But I'm sorry, that kid would have been eating that fucking phone. Or more realistically, it would have wound up snatched out of his hands and smashed to bits on the booger-smeared floor of that school bus, ground beneath my boot heel.
The implications of this still newfound ability we have to document, capture and archive every living, breathing second of our and everyone else's lives as if there's any reason to - as if we must merely because we can - have not yet been fully realized. I know it's a tall order, but cell phone use should be regulated in public places, at least amongst kids, and surely during school-sanctioned events. Kids cannot fully grasp the power they wield when they throw those phones up, nor conceive of the repercussions that may arise from doing so.
After all, these four kids have to live with their shameful behavior being out there for all the world to see too - now and thirty years from now. When they're middle aged and nothing's as funny as it used to be, when they don't remember half of the stupid crap they did when they were twelve and the stuff that they do remember makes them cringe, that video will still be out there somewhere, being viewed by someone, in world that no longer allows memories to fade.
