Bullying and Survivor

I just finished this week's episode of Survivor and felt the need to offer a few quick thoughts. The first is this: Survivor has all of the insidiousness of other reality shows and from time to time it comes through full force. The rest of this season has the potential to be ugly. You don't need to know much about the show to understand what's happening here; all you need to do is look at a high school cafeteria.

I say this in no small part because, while portraying itself as a game, Survivor has never escaped being personal. Every season the contestants get assigned to tribes arbitrarily and yet by the end of their time in the game they feel as if any breach of the tribal boundaries should warrant something akin to a death sentence. How it gets to that point is something that systems analysts or cultural anthropologists will have to explain. I am more interested in what it says about us as people.

Today, the stereotypical nerd, Cochran, a Harvard law student and all-around smart guy, decided it was in his best interest to go against his tribe. This was a dumb decision for one reason: Because the people he is going to vote out now hate him and everybody treats it as their duty to make certain that people who vote them out don't win. Putting that aside, what Cochran did is essentially what millions of kids fail to do every day of their lives: he stood up to a bully. Jim is a straight-up jerk; Keith isn't much better. Ozzy is kind of like the cool kid, Whitney the cheerleader/hanger-on, etc. Cochran was in a crappy situation and decided to get out of it.

What was Jim's response? The first word out of his mouth was: coward.

Right, Jim. That's what I think of when I see a guy being bullied finally stand up to the bullies. Coward. Brandon's response was apropos: "That's what you get for treating him like that."

My frustration with Survivor and the whole reality genre is unfortunately that it is all too real. There is a prevailing cultural ideology that sees behavior like this as acceptable. Cochran never had a chance to win this game because he was placed with players who decided from the start that he isn't the kind of player worthy of $1 million. Maybe in a different group a person like him would have a chance, but not with this group. All too sadly this is where many people find themselves in lives far more real than network television can ever display.

I'm not sure I have a solution to this. I want to stand up to people like Jim and say, "Coward." But even more I want to stand up to Cochran and say, "Congrats. You aren't winning $1 million, but there are some things far more valuable."