Empathy

I am blogging today with a sad heart.  I was listening to a story on my local news channel about a family who lost their middle school girl to suicide.  The child was being bullied and the parents were aware and doing all they could to help. Unfortunately, this is way too common a story.  The shockingly sad thing for me was the part where they showed how the girl was beaten by other girls her age and someone actually stood there and recorded it.  (Right now I am deciding if it is appropriate to use foul language in a blog...I won't, but I want to).   So... here is my question:  Are we teaching our children empathy?  In this competitive world that we live in, have we forgotten about how others feel?  Isn't our responsibility to make sure we at least TALK to our children about this?  Do we rely on teachers, clergy, grandprents, etc. to bring it up?  Bullying (to the extreme of causing someone to commit suicide)  is much more of a problem than it shoud be.  Most of us remember what it was like being bullied.  The boys terrorized the girls, the mean kids picked on the timid ones.  When I was in school the tough girls stabbed me with hat pins they stole from sewing class.  I think the difference may be that we didn't have the technology to give these acts such broad attention.  The more you feed this behavior, the more you get filled up with it.  Why do these mean children need this kind of attention?  Who is bullying the bully?  Here is a challenge...please talk to your children about this.  Make it a priority!  Maybe if all of us just take a few minutes out of our busy day to teach our children empathy we can actually do something positive to help stop bullying.  Let's make our kids think it's cool to  NOT be  a bully.