From a book that I have written about Bullying: The lack of empathy in our society is key to the epidemic bullying that has been building throughout our nation. The TV gives us a steady diet of fierce competition, with the winners beating their chests, and the losers bad-mouthing their opponents to the reporters waiting on the stairs. COMPETITION BREEDS BULLYING. The competition in the Entertainment Industry has become mainstream entertainment. America’s Top Model, American Idol, Survivor and Big Brother all show humans at their most competitive and in their weakest moments of character. These programs are voyeuristic and there is a judgmental and sadistic feel to some episodes. Another mode of entertainment, the Internet, has unfortunately become another tool for bullying. All great ideas can corrupt over time and the Internet is no exception. While the convenience of research and communication are still wonderful characteristics of the Internet, there is a dark side as well. In the new millennium a new apparatus of torment emerged. According to a 2008 New York Times article, The Trolls Among Us: Internet Trolls deliberately try to disrupt or even destroy people’s lives with cyber bullying. This can range from doing online smears (creating false profiles under the person’s name, slander on message boards, creating false Police Reports/Rap Sheets online, craigslist advertisements, etc.These forms of Cyberbullying happened to me. I have no Police record.) to sending harassing texts or emails directly to their victims. According to the New York Times article, the Trolls, “do it for LULZ, a distortion of LOL, meaning Lots of Laughs.” The Trolls can destroy lives for their entertainment with little risk of getting caught as it is all done anonymously. Many of these Trolls act collectively and as history has shown us, group behavior differs from individual behavior. The individual may be hampered with conscience where a group may justify the action because they have support. We are also involved in two expensive and deadly wars overseas as well as a war on civil rights right here at home in the USA.