DALLAS — Which is the more menacing threat to America’s teen-agers — a bully or a can of soda?
State legislatures are rushing to rescue our youth from bullies just as the world’s largest soft-drink maker agrees to save them from their sweet tooth.
Saying it is responding to complaints about the poor nutritional value of soft drinks, the Coca-Cola Co. is putting a cap on an aggressive marketing pitch to schools. Through exclusive “pouring rights” contracts with more than 200 schools, Coca-Cola and other soft-drink companies can put soda machines in school cafeterias and hallways in exchange for giving the schools millions in shared profits.
Coca-Cola President Jeffrey Dunn said last week that Coke would terminate some existing agreements, that it would encourage its bottlers to include water, juice and milk in vending machines, and that it would honor requests by school officials to restrict the hours and locations that drinks are peddled.
Given that these pouring contracts routinely run into the tens of millions of dollars, the Coke concessions are no small thing. According to estimates by the Department of Agriculture, 74 percent of boys and 65 percent of girls consume at least one soda a day.
If that seems like a lot — and it should — don’t blame Coke for leaving their soda machines standing about for kids to play with.
Blame the kids. And also blame the parents who influence consumption patterns of their children. Want your teen-ager to drink more milk? Stop buying soda at the grocery store. As Americans are working longer and longer hours, they may be too busy to nag their kids. For the record, my own dear mother has never been that busy.
Soft drink companies make soda. They shouldn’t be expected to make kids more nutrition-conscious. That is someone else’s job.
Elsewhere, some politicians are less worried about students’ health than about their safety. Given that the bullying of some students by others was cited as a factor in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo., lawmakers in that state are expected to pass legislation that would require every school district to have a policy to stamp out the age-old practice. Other states — Georgia, Washington, and New Hampshire among them — have also, as of late, adopted zero tolerance policies toward bullying.
At first glance, the “bully ban” seems like a good idea. But this latest well-intentioned government offensive is misdirected.
Bullies cannot be eradicated by government, because they are not made by government. They are made at the dinner table by parents who fail to teach their children the simplest of lessons: that the strong should not prey upon the weak.
Besides, these measures are all based on the assumption that bullying leads to bullets, bombs and bloodshed. Skeptics point out that, in a country where studies say that 15 percent of school-age children are bullied in any given year, there must be other factors that turn some — but not all — of the tormented into killers.
Yet Americans long ago ran out of explanations for what happened at Columbine. The massacre has been blamed on easy availability of guns, rock music, video games and Hollywood. Now, in the wake of the recent school shootings in Santee, Calif., the bully factor resurfaces.
Teen-agers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were, we are told, picked on by jocks and other classmates at Columbine to the point where they just snapped. It was to be expected, the explanation implies. It could happen to anyone.
The suggestion that Harris and Klebold were driven to kill by bullying excuses the killers of any responsibility for their own murderous acts. It also excuses the boys’ parents of their responsibility. It says that it is OK for a parent to find pipe-bomb-making materials in a child’s room — as one of the boys’ parents did before the massacre — and relay nothing to authorities.
There is nothing wrong with corporations showing decency and restraint in pitching less-than-healthy products to young people. Nor is there anything wrong with encouraging those young people to show decency and restraint in how they interact with one another.
Yet there is something troubling about how eagerly some parents seem to delegate elsewhere the raising of their kids. In the hugely important business of producing quality human beings, we must be careful not to confuse whatever role the private sector or government may play with the solemn responsibility that must be borne by parents alone.
That would do more harm to the average teen-ager than whatever damage may be inflicted by a bully or a can of Coke.
