Bus monitor Karen Klein's tormentors suspended for year, donations on her behalf = $670,000

[Igel]

2. Wasn't a human interest video.

After humiliating and denigrating a 68-year-old woman because of her age, weight, sex, and emotional response, some kid put the video up on facebook so that they could exult in how crude they were to somebody else and continue to mock her.


People are subjected to that every day by little "angels". And the little angels really do think that they are angels and quite fine people.

They've been really, really miseducated. They're all over empathy when *they* want to be the subject of it. They know how to get things for themselves, all the right buttons to push. They're just too wrapped up in their little worlds to think about empathy for others.

Having empathy is to be able to be empathetic to those different from yourself. That's hard, and while I don't know what percentage of Americans were ever really commonly able to do this I know that too many of them have stopped thinking it's worth trying. "Empathy" has dropped off to top 10 qualities emulated by high school graduates and new college freshmen for the first time ever.

The suspension will be appealed and reduced. And the donations were, like it or not, donations. Not from the school district. Notions of "excessive" don't really enter into it.