Briefly

UPDATE: For about 18 hours, I thought I had made a serious mistake at work last month that had sent a couple thousand dollars to the wrong party. When a problem was discovered last night, the data available to us in our accounting system made it seem certain that I had made that error. I felt sick. I was humiliated. Even though I’ve handled hundreds of real estate transactions for my company — millions of dollars — without ever making an error, I felt shame that I had made this one mistake. But it turns out that an anomaly in our accounting software was hiding the truth. Once I got to the office Thursday and reviewed the paperwork from the transaction, I discovered that I had done everything correctly. It’s great that I didn’t make the mistake, but it would be even better if I could learn not to have such horrible physical reactions of shame and fear just because someone else believes I’ve made an error. The fear of being flawed is very powerful for me. Old programming from childhood is hard to change.

How do children turn into bullies? New evidence suggests that it might start at home, with parents who mock or show contempt for their children. You’ve probably seen parents who demean or belittle their children in ways that humiliate and frustrate them. I certainly see it, sometimes from parents who are just mean and other times from parents who humiliate their children with insults disguised as humor. The study by researchers in the United States, Canada and Sweden found that this sort of parent often responds to child engagement with criticism, sarcasm, put-downs and hostility. There was also a strong correlation between this problem and the tendency to rely on emotional and physical coercion to force compliance from children. This sort of parental behavior often leads to “dysregulated” anger in children, and it’s indicative of difficulties with regulating negative emotions, verbal attacks, physical aggression and hostility. Children who are victims of this sort of parenting are at a greater risk for becoming bullies and for becoming “bully-victims,” which are bullies who are victimized by other bullies. I was controlled with lot of demeaning and humiliating behavior from my father as a child, so I can definitely understand what this does to adolescents.

I couldn’t care less who plays the part of Ariel in Disney’s remake of “The Little Mermaid.” I probably won’t see it no matter who’s in it or how good it is. But if you’re one of those who is smugly screaming about racism because some people disagree with the casting of a black actress to play Ariel, you’ve succumbed to a bizarre tendency today to brand anything you don’t understand as racist if it even slightly involves race. A tiny minority of those who are unhappy with the casting decision might be racists, but the vast majority are those who simply know the character in a particular way, which happens to be a red-headed white girl. If Star Trek were remade and Uhura was cast as white or Asian, I would be upset, not because I’m racist, but simply because she’s an established character who’s black. This seems like the same thing. Stop screaming about racism when people simply disagree with you for reasons that have nothing to do with racism.