Everybody knows that bullying is wrong, right? Your parents tell you and your teachers tell you. Your friends tell you. Everybody tells you. But do these figures of authority, whom we practically worship throughout our younger years, even realize when they are the ones committing such heinous acts? Because that’s exactly what school administrators ended up doing to a kid in North Carolina.
Basically what happened was that nine-year-old Grayson Bruce was getting bullied every day in school because he, being a fan of My Little Pony, wore a backpack featuring Rainbow Dash, a character from the show, to school.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking: “Of course he’s getting bullied, he’s wearing a girly backpack to school every day.” But that argument is horse pucky in today’s America, where risqué is the new black.
“Lots of people say that the school was right in its decision,” senior Alexander Capizzi said. “They say that if you ‘take away the lights shining around and drawing attention to you, the bullies will leave you alone.”
The main problem here is that school administrators basically said the same thing. They told Bruce’s mom that her son was “asking for trouble,” and that he should hide the backpack, as it was a “trigger for bullying.” This was from the school’s counselor, for Pete’s sake, and then to make things even worse, the principal phoned home and told his mother not to send her son to school with the backpack in question.
“Regardless of what other people say, I think that the school was wrong,” Capizzi said. “He [Bruce] is just an innocent little kid. He should be able to display his individuality.”
The school did nothing to reprimand the students who were actually bullying Bruce.
One does not simply grant amnesty to bullies while punishing victims.
The message they sent was, in essence: Don’t deserve to be bullied, and it won’t happen. From the flip side: It’s okay to bully kids who don’t fit the norm.
Capizzi, who is a My Little Pony aficionado himself, stated that there was also a definite double standard with regard to gender roles.

“Guys can sometimes be into girls that play video games and act like tomboys, but boys must fit the masculine model or everybody makes fun of them,” Capizzi said. “Everybody says that girls won’t go for the ‘nice guy,’ and so you end up with all these posers which compounds the problem.”
Even though the school has since reversed its decision, it got so bad, with some kids telling Bruce to go home and kill himself, that he eventually became reluctant to even go to school.
My question is: What game is this school playing? It’s never okay to bully a kid. Ever. You ought to know that, school system. Sure, what he’s doing isn’t “normal.” I think we can all agree on that, but this is America. We put the individual above societal norms in this country.