By: Jill Helton

They’re heard throughout the hallways of every high school. People just toss them around like it’s nothing – and more times than not, they are taken as nothing. At CA, they are generally interchanged between good friends in jest, but that’s not always the case.

I’m talking about insults: words that are spoken with disrespect. How often do we stop to think about what happens if the person on the receiving end doesn’t take our words so humorously?

We toss these combinations of vowels and consonants across the classroom as if the insults they form are mere jests. This is so incredibly false. Yes, some might have learned to disregard these comments, but others might not.

These words have a way of creeping into a person’s thoughts and making their home for sometimes years. They gnaw away at every ounce of confidence that has ever been held by the person.

We think since we are confident in ourselves, that everyone else is too.

This is proven to be true in the case of Jimmy, a character in the TV series One Tree Hill, which Mrs. Foster aired in class recently. This episode deals with the bullying of a student. Jimmy has been relentlessly harassed throughout his entire high school experience and, eventually, it becomes too much to handle. He brings a gun to school in hopes that he will be able to gain some respect.

The situation gets out of control and he fires the gun in the hallway, forcing a lockdown in the school. No one knows it was Jimmy, so he hides, with other students, from the presumed shooter. In the end, Jimmy is so overwhelmed with all the chaos that he takes his life.

The question is now proposed: who is at fault? Jimmy or the harassers? In my opinion, it is both. Jimmy is responsible for the gun and the shooting. The harassers are responsible for the underlying depression that has ahold of Jimmy.

It is true, hurtful comments can be inevitable. But this doesn’t mean they have to be. Obviously we know these comments are only jokes, but we seem to not take time to think about whether or not they are received in that sense. Words have more of an effect than we think, and that is forgotten too often.