David McElroy

For those of us who still wander around the world feeling frustrated about poor grammar and spelling, it’s starting to feel as though we need to take this approach — and we’ll still be ignored as people continue to devolve into “txt spk.”

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Karen Klein is a bus monitor on a school bus in suburban Rochester, N.Y., but she probably feels more like a Christian who’s been thrown to the lions — because the kids she deals with are vile, filthy-mouthed and just plain mean.

On Monday, one of the middle school kids who rides the bus recorded video of various students taunting Klein and making fun of her weight, her clothes and her purse, among other things. It’s disgusting to watch, but you can see it below. Even after it’s obvious that she’s crying, they continue to taunt her.

One of the most heart-breaking parts is when a student says she doesn’t have a family, because they all committed suicide so they wouldn’t have to be around her. Klein’s oldest son did commit suicide 10 years ago, so she said this was the most hurtful thing the kids said to her. We have no idea whether they knew about her son’s suicide.

If this is where the story ended, I’m not sure I’d even be sharing it with you. When I first saw the video on Wednesday, I thought it was too depressing to write about. But then someone took it upon himself to help Klein — and the results have been amazing.

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Most people have no idea what they stand for, but they know very clearly who and what they hate. That makes me very uneasy, because I feel it from people of every political position — and this isn’t the way things ought to be.

When George W. Bush was president, most Democrats hated him far more than they liked any Democrat who might take his place. Since Barack Obama has been president, most Republicans hate him with a passion, but only a tiny percentage of them actually like Mitt Romney, who won the GOP contest to be their standard-bearer. Why is this?

I think part of it is a modern form of tribalism. We like to think of ourselves as past such crude ways of acting, but that’s wishful thinking. If you arbitrarily divide people into a Purple Party and a Yellow Party, both groups will soon develop all sorts of “reasons” why their sides is wonderful and the other is evil and wrong. (And they’ll each declare that their reasons are rational.)

Beyond that, though, I suspect there’s another very important reason. It’s simply easier to feel and express hate than it is to articulate something good and find the character to stand for that instead of the hate.

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