Anti-Bullying Rally or "Woah, Sick Trick, Dudeee" Rally?

Last week, as most of us know, there was a rally held to teach us high schoolers about the traumatic effects that bullying can cause in a child's future. Before this rally was held, I was pretty excited about it because students should learn when enough is enough and at what extent constant teasing turns to bullying, but that education factor that I expected at the rally didn't actually happen at all. When I was leaving my sixth period class to go out to the rally, I was very surprised to see the set-up, which was supposed to teach us about being kind to others, turn out to be a skating ramp with a bunch of speakers around it blasting music. This didn't consist of any useful information to apply in situations where someone might be getting bullied or witnessing an instance of bullying going on.

After a while of watching the professionals skate and bike across the ramp, I expected that they would at least stop and begin to discuss different ways to take action against bullying, which is a huge problem in schools all over America, but that was definitely not the case. Sure, the speaker would toss out a few facts about how transfer students are more likely to be bullied, and how some people drop out of high school because of such severe bullying, and so on. But the speaker's objective at that rally wasn't to get us to stand up for what's right, instead it was to flood our minds with the advertisement of hardcore skating and biking on ramps. In no way at all does that even correlate to the topic of bullying. This just frustrated me because I couldn't believe that the people speaking there didn't discuss the actions that should be taken to solve this world-wide problem once during the entire hour we were watching them, even though they could comment on all the cool tricks nonstop.



Lastly, it was brought to my attention that there was so much advertisement, not only for the skaters and bikers, but also for the military. I didn't really notice any of it until my friend pointed it out to me, and I was amazed. The skate ramp was covered in military banners, the speaker referenced to the military officers many times, the entire event was partially sponsored by the military, and the rally even had a pull-up bar for people to see if they were capable of meeting the requirements of officers in the army. This entire event was just screaming at people to join the army or at least donate to it, which is even farther away from the original objective of educating kids on bullying than the sweaty speaker's objective.

I really hope that if we have this rally again, it will be more informative and actually help students learn to cope with these types of difficult situations.