When I think of bullies, I think of Scott Farkus. Scott Farkus, what a rotten name! He had yellow eyes! So help me God, yellow eyes!

For anyone who might not up to speed with the Christmas classics, Scott Farkus is the embodiment of all depravity in “A Christmas Story.” Unfortunately, whether it’s attributed to media hype or if kids really have become more aggressive over the past few decades, it seems that bullying in recent years has taken a turn for the worse. The modern-day Scott Farkus is 20 pounds heavier, with more pent up belligerence (the equivalent of the ED-209 in “Robocop”) and there’s more of them.

Bullying is anything but a new phenomenon. Everyone knows that bullies have been an age-old plight for young people for ... well, forever – all the way back to when Adam made the first “no girls allowed” club in the Garden of Eden. And while it might be true that bullying induces the same emotional trauma today as what was left by the Scott Farkuses of previous generations, others see it as a rite of passage ... and maybe, to an extent, they’re right. Arguably, bulling is just a part of growing up. Kids, particularly those at younger grade levels, don’t always grasp the implications of their harsh words or the long-term effects those words carry. I think the underlying problem is that students today are dealing with new methods of bullying. For example, cyber-bullying, something unheard of ten years ago, allows kids to slander their peers to an audience of hundreds, if not thousands, within seconds.

Adding insult to injury (pun intended), bullying is more common now than ever before, something not too surprising, given the incredible changes of our culture over the last two decades; the changing dynamics of the nuclear family, the average household that requires two working parents, and a suffering economy that shatters the dream of higher education for millions of young adults.