ANOTHER TEENAGER CYBERBULLIED TO DEATH

BULLIED TEEN GIRL KILLED
BY BUS HOLDING SUICIDE NOTE

www.examiner.com - On January 6, 2012, mourners flocked to St. Ann’s Church to pay final respects to 15-year-old Amanda Diane Cummings.   According to relatives, she was a popular girl bullied by a group of mean girls at high school.  While some family members knew she was being tormented, the bullying was not reported to school officials at the teen’s urging.  
After a recent breakup with a boyfriend and constant bullying, the pretty high school sophomore walked into the path of an oncoming city bus at about 7:30 P.M. on December 27, 2011.   According to reports, a suicide note was found on her person.  She succumbed to her injuries six days after the incident, on January 2, 2012.

 While friends and family say she was kind to everyone and always had a smile on her face, hundreds of hurtful and hateful messages and images continued to be posted on her Facebook page not only while she was alive, but while she was in a coma fighting for her life and even they are still being published after her death!  Like traditional bullying, cyberbullying is a serious issue that can result in low self-esteem, anger, depression, absenteeism, bad grades and as in this case, suicide.  As electronic bullying continues to increase, perhaps more states will finally enact tough anti-bullying laws that will protect children from online and offline bullies? It was reported in 2010 that one out of five middle-school students claim that they were victims of cyber bullying in the USA.

Amanda Cummings, 15, died after being struck by a bus as she was carrying a suicide note.  She was a sophomore at High School, where she was being bullied by her classmates.  The bullies were posting inappropriate and cruel things on her Facebook wall, even while she was in the hospital.  Cyber bullying is a great danger if social networking sites turn into areas for insults and taunts.  Sometimes an intense hatred awakes in the soul, so we see others as enemies and we want to see them suffering.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US? 

Attracted to maya, the soul becomes bewildered. Then he is not attracted to pure spirit. ‘It is ‘I’ and ‘It is mine’ are the two conceptions maya thrusts upon the soul. Then the soul thinks, ‘This material body is mine’ and ‘I am this body’. In this condition the soul loves persons who bring pleasure to his material body and hates persons who thwart the bringing of pleasure to his material body. Thus the bewildered soul becomes a slave of love and hatred. The bewildered soul thinks others are either his friends or his enemies in three ways: 1. saririla (in relation to material bodies), 2. samajika (in relation to society and social groups), and 3. naitika (in the context of ideas).  That condition of life is called samsara (enslavement in the world of repeated birth and death).

Śrīla Saccidananda Bhaktivinoda Thākura :
“Jaiva-dharma” (The Universal Religion)
Chapter Three: Naimittik Dharma Asampurna, Heya, Misra O Acirasthayi
http://bvml.org/SBTP/index.htm
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