You Show 'Em, Susan Boyle!

If you haven't seen and heard Susan Boyle yet, you must watch this video. (Embedding has been disabled.)

The video alone is inspiring--the audience and the judges expected her to be awful based on her looks, her age, and her cheeky confidence.

But then I read about her story. She was teased as a child because her brain was deprived of oxygen at birth, and she had some learning disabilities. She's 47 and has never been kissed. She quit her job a few years ago to take care of her ailing mother, who died last year at the age of 91. To this day, neighborhood louts harass her by ringing her doorbell and running away.

She will show all those idiot bullies and naysayers--young teenyboppers in the audience who roll their eyes at her.

Susan Boyle's triumph on the stage of "Britain's Got Talent" is particularly poignant to me this week, as bullying has reared its ugly head again this week in the life of one of my sons. It makes me want to rage like a mother bear, to march on down to that school and give those insensitive boys a piece of my mind.

I think of the pain and suffering I bore in junior high school as I tried not to let the loser bullies know they'd gotten to me. And here comes the uncharitable, un-Christian me: it truly makes me feel so much better to know in my heart that Shannon and Kayleen's lives are probably miserable as adults.

How ironic that I married a bully. Mike thinks that all of this is karma getting even with him for how he mistreated other kids. I find it reassuring that, even though he was a bully at one time, he is the most sensitive, sweet man I know. So maybe there is hope for those bullies after all.

Comments

  1. Marie, thank you so much for sharing this. I can't stop crying!! I never would have seen this otherwise and it has made my day!! I think it gives a sense of vindication. A sense that, hey, 47 doesn't mean your life is over, or that all of your chances or gone. Mica

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  2. Here's another Susan Boyle song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5ETPG26ALE&feature=player_embedded

    She sang "Cry Me a River" on a charity CD in 1999. Beautiful!

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