Maybe it was the tragic trifecta of bangs, glasses, and braces that marked me a prime target on bus rides to Northmont Middle School in the fall of 1997. It could have been a certain demeanor, a silliness that peaked after eight class periods and liked making girlfriends laugh, usually through outbursts of song. Maybe it was something less obvious, a sensitive spirit that peers, angry and hardened by who knows what, could sniff out. For whatever reason, Tara sniffed out me.

Tara lived on Rankin, a newly developed street three past Herr Street, down which I walked every morning at 7:10 to catch the bus. The mornings were okay, mostly; I'd slide into a military-green seat near the front and look intently out the window, avoiding eyes with Tara and her posse of highschoolers as they boarded. Tara had long brown hair and wore Nike Jordans; she displayed the brashness of the women I had seen on The Real World, which I had sneakily watched in my grandmother's basement the summer prior. A mere 13 to my 12, Tara boasted about boys and mocked dumb teachers and threatened to "beat up the bitches" who crossed her. Even then I dimly perceived a certain chaos in her home; she had an older brother in and out of jail, and her father was gone.

The afternoons were when it began. I learned early in the year that my loud singing had drawn Tara's attention—the last thing you want from a bully—so on the rides home I kept my head low and spoke rarely. But as we were about 10 minutes from my house, Tara and her cousin Jo would start hissing at me, for everyone to hear, "Look at that dumb bitch!" "What are you wearing?" "What are you going to do, cry all the way home?" Janine and Lauren, two friends, said nothing, fearing trial by association. The driver never intervened. On it went for the majority of seventh grade, once escalating into hitting—but I never said a word back.

Karen Klein didn't say much back either. The 68-year-old grandmother of eight from upstate New York endured verbal torture from four middle-school boys, one of whom recorded the encounter on his cell phone and posted it on YouTube last week. In "Making the Bus Monitor Cry," the teens hurl taunts like, "You don't have a family because they all killed themselves because they didn't want to be near you." (Klein's son committed suicide 10 years ago.) One boy pokes Klein's arm with a book, saying if he were to stab her, his knife would go through her "like butter."

Just as disturbing as these cruel taunts, which only worsen throughout the 10-minute film, is that Klein never responds. An adult with the clear authority in the situation (ironically, bus monitors are hired precisely to stop bullies), Klein stays seated, eventually crying. The scene is both heart-wrenching, drawing outraged calls for the boys to be punished as well as thousands of threatening text messages, and a bit unsettling.

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Others, apparently, have found it so as well. Since the video went viral, media commentators have given plenty of explanations for why an adult wouldn't kick the children off the bus immediately—everything from the isolated nature of school buses to our country's rancorous political scene to the "mob mentality" of young teens. I wonder, however, if Klein sat passively because she had come to believe, somewhere along the way, that good people "rise above" extreme personal offense and brush off insults. Or, in Christian parlance, that they "turn the other cheek."

Jesus' Matthew 5 teaching was countercultural at the time, and it remains so, proving pivotal in the philosophy that undergirded the U.S. civil rights movement and India's emancipation from British rule. But I'm afraid that applying it to cases of bullying—whether involving children or adults—misses the point of Christ's original teaching, and misses God's best for us.

Biblical scholars understand Jesus' command as a warning against letting anger and the urge to retaliate consume a victim of mistreatment. Explicitly countering the "eye for an eye" teaching his original listeners know well, Jesus is outlawing revenge. In his essay "Why I Am Not a Pacifist," C. S. Lewis summed up Jesus' teaching this way: "Insofar as you are simply an angry man who has been hurt, mortify your anger and do not hit back."

But self-defense and revenge are not the same. Unlike revenge, which lowers the victim's dignity to the level of the abuser, self-defense preserves the victim's dignity, showing the abuser that the victim won't stoop to their level or passively forebear such evil. Instead, the victim becomes a person with agency—the kind of person God created him or her to be—who loves herself enough to refuse such hatred.

Under Tara's fiery insults, I wilted like a flower, then cried on the walk home before telling my parents that it had happened, again. I had no agency. My parents, who had recently become evangelical Christians, told me I needed to forgive Tara and to "give the situation to God." No doubt both principles were gesturing in the right direction, and I tried desperately to do both. But they weren't enough, and I suffered through the rest of the school year.

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As for herself, Klein has received an outpouring of support and over $600,000 to take the "vacation of a lifetime." "You've taught an invaluable lesson," says one commenter on the donation site. "You did the right thing. You kept your composure," says another.

Klein very well may have done a good thing, but she didn't do the best thing. I would have liked to have seen Klein's composure paired with a loud "no!" to the 13-year-old perpetrators sending her to verbal hell—as I wish I would have gotten angry on my own behalf in junior high. As Klein told reporters this week, "I can't believe it happened … It was just plain mean. Nobody should have to put up with that."

That includes you, Karen. And only you can stop it.

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