"When I was growing up, bullying was assumed to be a rite of passage. If you got beat up on the playground, that was supposed to toughen you up and show you how to "be a man." If kids called you names, that was "just teasing," and you were told to ignore it and it would stop. And almost no one talked about bullying among girls. The good news is that society is taking bullying a lot more seriously these days. The bad news is that it took tragedies like school shootings to make us wake up. Bullying is abuse, and it carries serious short-term and long-term consequences for all involved: the bullies, the targets, and the observers. Nearly everyone can remember that white-hot feeling when a bully said something meant to humiliate, or the time you tried to will yourself torment you in the locker room, even twenty or thirty years after it happened. Nearly everyone can remember the poor kid who was at the bottom of the social totem pole at school, and any of us can remember wishing to help, but keeping our mouths shut out of fear of being the next target of looking "uncool.""