Empathy and Amanda Todd

After I watched the video of Amanda Todd spilling her soul about being horrifically bullied I had a thought.

Here's the video in case you haven't seen it:



The story is tragic. Here's a beautiful young girl who made a mistake; revealing her breasts over the internet. Consequently, she's punished over and over again. She's tortured and bullied to the point where she takes her own life.

In itself, this is a horrific tale. But what makes it far worse, as my friend Justin pointed out to me, is the comments that are being made on the tribute pages.

People are saying things like "I'm glad she's dead."

Amanda Todd was a girl, she was a daughter, she was a friend, and (most importantly) she was a human being. She was not a serial killer. She doesn't deserve to have this malicious backlash of comments about her after she is dead.

The problem here is  our troubled society. Our children are lacking empathy. I'm not sure how that happened, but it needs to be fixed immediately.

Empathy is an integral skill that should be taught to every human being.

What we should be thinking and writing on these pages, is "how sad," "rest in peace," "a life is lost." Statements like that that show concern, love, and empathy.

All of us as human beings have felt some degree of pain; pain feels awful. Clearly, Amanda was in a lot of pain. As humans that have experienced pain, we should be able to think to ourselves, and even articulate out loud "Wow, she hurting, that's really tragic, I know what it's like to hurt, I feel for her."

We must take action. We need to remedy the fact that some of our children are lacking this skill. Society cannot tolerate this malicious behavior.

Teach your children to respect other people's feelings. Teach your son or daughter to empathize with others. Teach them to name how they feel out loud. Teach them to name how other people are feeling out loud.

Empathy is important. If we could all be more empathetic, think about how our society could drastically change.