Who's Megan Meier, and why should you care??

The above video is about a girl named Megan Meier and is one that everyone needs to hear. Kids and adults a like need to take a sensitivity class before signing up for myspace. Perhaps it should be a requirement that they see this video and others like it before being granted access to sites like this.
For those of you who don't know, Megan Meier was a 13 year old girl with a myspace account. Like most girls at this age, Megan was having trouble in school with some other girls around her age (as girls tend to get very catty around this age).
Megan's neighbor didn't like her for whatever reason, so she and a 19 year old friend of the family (with her mother's permission) jumped online and created a false myspace account. They pretended to be a boy named Josh Evans to lure Megan in.
The goal was to get information out of Megan and when they were done they got mean. They started calling her names and eventually told Megan that the world would be a better place without her. Not knowing the profile was being run by a couple of cruel girls down the street, Megan ran to her room and hung herself.
Cyber bullying is a real problem. For those of us who are in our late twenty's and beyond, we remember a time of facing bully's on the playground, battling it out at 3pm and moving on. Today's kids are more cruel and far more dangerous. Kids don't know how to cope with trauma and stress and when pushed over the edge kill themselves or others around them.
For a lot of us, Columbine was the first time we saw kids get pushed to that extreme. For a fewer number, we silently understood the pain that went into the actions of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. It's hard to be considered the odd man out, especially when being faced with the changes of our bodies, the sudden insecurities of adolesence and puberty, and then suddenly being classified and labeled as if those labels suddenly determined our worth.
I was a kid who was full of anger. I was being abused at home, and then had to deal with people pushing my buttons at school. I was depressed and alone, and silently pleading for someone to save me from my hell. When people pushed I could have exploded, but I knew I didn't want others to hurt like I did, so I contained that rage to a degree.
In the 21st century, it's hard to imagine little boys and girls sometimes as early as 10, getting on line and tormenting each other.
I know a lot of parents like to think of themselves as being progressive and hip and in return want to give their kids all of the luxuries they didn't have growing up, so they give them dvd players, video game systems, cell phones, and computers. The first two are fairly safe except for the occasional porn disc that might make its way in your house (which we all know by now is common at the onset of puberty since kids are curious), BUT it's the other 2 that have me concerned.
In our house, I allowed the kids to create Gaia accounts. Gaia is an anime version of a social networking site. I joined also to keep an eye on them. To my dismay I found that even our kids were falling into the wrong path of curiosity and immediately stopped their accounts. Even more importantly, I talked to them.
Kids are kids. Whether in this century or the last. Just because they make be more technically savvy then you were at their age, it doesn't mean their minds are truly capable of handling the world around them. In my opinion, kids today are actually at more of a disadvantage then an advantage. We give them a lot of material things, but don't show them how to handle stress, or curiosity the right way. We take more time to teach them how to use a cell phone, then to teach them responsibility for fear that we are being too strict.
If the mother of the girls who tormented Megan Meier took the time to be a parent, rather than try to be her "best friend" then perhaps Megan would still be a live today! I really hope that Ashley Grills (the 19 year old involved),
This is the result of bullying. People get their feelings hurt, and you never know when they're going to snap. It wasn't okay when we were growing up and it's not okay now. It's not a rite of passage and can only lead to problems. Talk to your kids about bullying. If they use technology, teach them how to use it responsibly. Read their messages, make sure they're not being bullied or worse yet, that they're not bullying. You never know how many lives you might save. If you think I'm going overboard let me remind you of why: