Bullying and 19 minutes of death
THIS WEEK’S WINNER
Michi Ferreol, 15, was vale-dictorian of her seventh-grade graduating class at Saint Pedro Poveda College. She is an incoming sophomore at the International School of Manila. She has traveled to
In 19 minutes, you can watch the first inning of a baseball game, have a quick breakfast, and give your pet puppy a bath. In 19 minutes, you can prepare a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, or solve a math problem. You can climb a tree or read an essay by a young girl about an incredibly moving book.
In 19 minutes, you can change the world.
Of course, these days, everyone’s too busy worrying about rising oil prices to fret about changing the world. I’d personally use any spare 19 minutes in my schedule to kick back and watch a Friends rerun, or finish up a biology lab report. Lately, however, I’ve been spending most of my time poring over the pages of my paperback copy of Jodi Picoult’s novel, Nineteen Minutes.
Picoult’s novels are famous for being blatantly truthful and it is this honesty that grips audiences across the globe. This novel is no exception. Through Nineteen Minutes, Picoult has taught me the value of friendship and compassion in our estranged society, where being different seems to bear nothing but punishment.
In the novel, 19 minutes is all it takes to bring the world to a screeching halt — or at least this is how it seems when a school tragedy unexpectedly plagues a small, crime-free town in New Hamsphire.
Peter Houghton, an outcast, a freak, a nerd, is habitually tormented and ridiculed by his classmates and the popular kids. He is stuffed inside lockers, slammed into walls for walking too closely, and stripped of his pants in the middle of the cafeteria. Unable to handle any more of the torture, Peter is driven to malice by a final act of bullying, and decides to use his last 19 minutes on earth to get his revenge.
He arrives at Sterling High one morning, armed with two handguns and two shotguns, and begins a killing spree that takes 10 lives. Peter murders nine students and one teacher and injures 19 more before being taken into custody. Devastated and angered, the townspeople demand Peter’s immediate imprisonment even before hearing his side. Alex Cormier, the judge presiding over Peter’s case, is torn between overseeing the biggest litigation in her career and safeguarding the emotional vulnerability of her own daughter, Josie Cormier, who has survived the shooting and is the state’s best witness. Toggling between the past and present, the real events of the incident unfold, and the reasons for Peter’s actions become known. The fault lines between the students and the entire community come to the surface, and the cruelty of discrimination and ignorance is unveiled.
What first sprouted as pure hatred for Peter Houghton becomes compassion and empathy as we learn about his past and ask — is not 19 minutes of revenge a fair retribution for a lifetime of pain and silence?
Cruelty. Revenge. Death. Such vicious topics for such innocent eyes. I was clearly not emotionally ready to handle this book, but then no one ever is or will be. Nobody wants to believe it can happen. Even after watching countless documentaries, seeing the heart-wrenching news, and listening to endless lectures and class discussions about such occurrences, everyone still thinks: It will never happen here. Not in my school. Not in my town.
Surely, these same thoughts went through the minds of the Columbine High students and the victims at the
I recently conducted a school project on the topic of bullying. The colorful, eye-catching layout of our display revolved around the theme of bullying, but the cheerfulness of the booth contrasted with the sad stories we had to tell. Like Peter, kind, intelligent and gentle kids all around the world are getting picked on and being pushed around for simply acting differently or for being true to themselves.
Back in kindergarten, they told us to cross out the picture that was different from the rest. They taught us that the duck facing right should be crossed out because all the others were facing left. Does this mean that being different and unique is wrong?
Teenagers grow up and feel the urge to “cross out” everything that seems out of place. Do you want to know how things are like in my high school? It’s just like Peter’s Sterling High. It’s a social world where divisions are best seen at the tables during lunchtime. Aside from the respected freshman-sophomore-junior-senior partition, there’s the Asian clan, the teachers’ pets, the honor students, the musical artists, the anime lovers, and the party girls. And in this kingdom, which is ruled by the jocks and their girlfriends, the homecoming queen and her faithful posse, and the mean girls, the “X marks” fall on the nerds (or the dorks, freaks, geeks, or whatever you want to call them).
But really, these students are just victims of bullies and they don’t deserve to be treated badly.
The killings in places like Columbine and Virginia Tech — and stories like Peter Houghton’s — are enough to scare an incoming sophomore like myself to go into complete reclusion instead of enduring the last three years of high school. But if there’s anything Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes taught me, it’s that the world is as fragile as a pond. A pebble dropped on one side will cause ripples that can be felt even at the very corners of the opposite end.
Whatever I can do — no matter how tiny — may help someone in a great way.
Is it fair to say that Peter Houghton did what he did just because he was bullied? Of course not. Can we be sure that one person’s kindness could’ve changed his actions? Of course not. However, we can say that a series of small, hurtful actions led to Peter’s terrible fate. And we can say that a million small deeds of kindness could’ve changed the way Jodi Picoult’s novel ended. But we can still be sure that if we take the time to smile at a stranger, offer a word of comfort to a depressed classmate, or stand up for a person being bullied in the hallway, we can most definitely change the endings to our own stories.
Maybe in one minute. Maybe in two. Or maybe, in Nineteen Minutes.
