TUPATALK: Hazing is out of bounds

Many years ago, someone told me a story of tragedy that flings back quickly whenever I hear of hazing incidents.

I worked on a newspaper in a Bartlesville-sized city in Northern California. Part of the community lie in the shade of huge butte named Table Mountain.

As in many towns located near a huge hill or a mountain, a large block letter, usually the first initial of the high school, had been built on the side of the rise. Every once a while, a painting party went up the slope to whitewash the letter.

Many years before I arrived in town, the tradition was for freshmen to be compelled to paint the block.

Sadly, one year some of the older boys to hide on the slope and terrorize, even harass or beat up, the freshmen.

One of the freshmen became so panicked when some of these boys — the son of the school superintendent — approached him that he unwisely jumped in the broad, fast-moving river that flowed through the town.

He drown in the process of trying to get away, his body found a way downstream.

Of course, some reforms resulted.

But, why did it take a death to end this kind of bullying.

That’s what hazing is — it’s bullying, made worse because it comes along with aspect of peer pressure.

What is it that causes people to find pleasure in seeing other people suffer? I’m not talking about saying the wrong thing, or losing one’s temper momentarily and lashing out verbally, or Boot Camp-type training, accidentally doing something that causes someone else pain or other acceptable controlled purposes.

I’m talking about this impulse to consciously and deliberately cause someone else extreme duress or physical pain.

Usually, this impulse is a collective thing that’s part of group politics — that if the group does it, no one in the group is responsible individually.

But, the opposite is true. Each person in the group who went along with the hazing or cruelty, and didn’t try to stop it, is responsible.

There’s no value to hazing, even if the intent isn’t to cause sensory pain or fright. When it becomes a serious threat to health or some kind of mental or emotional breakdown, it is inexcusable.

It’s one thing to make the freshmen tote equipment, do extra cleaning chores, get on the bus last, and so on. I think stuff like that can strengthen the team tradition of respecting those who have stuck it out long enough to be upper classmen — as long as those extra chores are appropriate and fairly enforced.

But, to pressure someone to risk life, health or reputation — or to torture them — to prove their loyalty or something like that, is bullying that is the product of warped thought.

I think that extends to those who perform so-called practical jokes whose purpose is to inflict severe hardship on someone else.

The fact is this: Each person has only one life and only so much health and emotional resiliency. We ought to be trying to help each other be stronger and less burdened.

Everyone has to answer for themselves how they treat someone who does’t fit in their group. But, hazing and bullying are never the right answer.

There are proper ways, even humorous ones, to decide to allow someone in a fraternity/sorority or some other association. But, there needs to be a line between civilized rituals of admittance or subjecting someone to cruelty.

This article originally appeared on Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise: TUPATALK: Hazing is out of bounds