At the risk of being targeted for psychiatric evaluation, I confess here and now that, when I was in school, I was picked on by people whom most today would reasonably conclude were bullies.
I certainly thought so at the time, and so did many of those adults who were aware of the activity. I doubt the bullies thought of themselves that way then, though maybe in the wake of the mass shootings at high schools in recent years their consciousnesses have been raised. Without a doubt, the notion of having one’s favorite taunting target suddenly turn the tables with a gun, tends to focus one’s attention on one’s own behavior. But whatever guilty thoughts may be passing through the minds of those grown men (and yes, women) today, doesn’t change what happened back then. And what happened back then was, they survived. And so did I.
It wasn’t uncommon in those days for my complaints to teachers about bullying to be futile. Sometimes I was even accused of deliberately inviting the torment: kids wouldn’t focus so much on me if I weren’t doing something to provoke it. In retrospect, I can see that such responses were from people who thought I could get along better by being more like everybody else. I wasn’t just different, I was an individualist despite not even having heard of the word yet. I knew that I had a right to think for myself, to make my own decisions about things that were nobody else’s business, and to enjoy things that gave me pleasure — like knowing the right answer when Teacher asked the class a question.
I also knew I had a right not to be pressed and formed into a Kid McMuffin by any school administration, classmate, or even (had it been an issue) my own parents.
It may startle many public-school reformers to know that the conformity factories where most of this early unpleasantness took place, sometimes it seemed with tacit adult approval, were not government-owned schools. I did attend government-owned schools for the three years now deemed “middle-school,” but nine of my twelve pre-college school years were spent in Catholic schools. To be fair though, the one time I had a schoolmate hold a knife to my neck — a puny X-Acto knife, no real danger — was at a government-owned school. So I guess it sort of evened out.
The talk about bullying today seems oddly antiseptic compared to my memories of what used to happen to me. Maybe bullying has been defined so far down that it now includes having someone sneer at one’s shoes in the hall. When I was bullied, usually a fight ensued — if not immediately, eventually. It wasn’t always one-on-one. I rarely if ever had anyone take up for me; those who weren’t against me felt safer just watching. Sometimes I sought to even the odds, or even gain advantage, in unsporting ways. Once I unfolded a tiny pocket knife, scarcely more dangerous than the aforementioned X-Acto, and of course I never touched the kid with it — as soon as he saw it, he lost all desire to fight and ran home. That was about the time I began to understand the concept of deterrence.
It was during those “middle school” years that I began to make headway against it all. I gained confidence in my ability to defend myself physically, even though early on one of my most decisive defeats was by a girl in my class. Every once in a blue moon someone who targeted me for a pounding would wind up with a fat lip, a black eye, a bloody nose — and maybe even a new attitude. Once a guy I was fighting accused me of having something in my hand when I hit him back, but my hand was empty. Hey, not only could I hit, I could hit hard.
Not every challenge could be met physically though. One boy threatened, quite credibly I thought, to beat me up fiercely on the last day of school — so on that day I told another bully something uncomplimentary that the first one had said about him. I’m sure the Klingons would not have approved.
By the time I got into high school, while I may not have become a widely respected member of the pack, I was more or less free of the fear that I might have had about the way the others treated me. Also, it being an all-boys school at the time, I didn’t have to worry about getting beat up again by a girl…
The advent of testosterone undoubtedly affected how I dealt with would-be tormentors in those years. In a blind rage one time, I chased one the entire length of the school before he realized who he was running away from. He stopped, threw a punch that I ran right into, and then he had to take a step back and start talking fast when I kept coming. He promised to take up the matter with me after school, but he never showed. One who did show, inadvertently broke my nose and when he realized I was unfazed by the torrent of blood running down my face, decided it must matter more to me than to him, and walked away.
In the long years since I have occasionally run into someone I knew back then, including people whom I would once have hated for their treatment of me. Turned out, it mattered a lot more to me than to pretty much any of them, and now it doesn’t matter to me at all, except as fodder for an article on bullying. Given how it all turns out, the overall memory is actually kind of pleasant. I got in trouble a lot. I bled a lot. I was humiliated and terrorized and sometimes feared grievous injury. And I outsmarted them, threw a scare into them, actually inflicted educational pain on them, and later became friends with them.
These days I hear about how people long since grown up are still traumatized by what they went through in high school. Yeah, those nasty remarks about your shoes must have been terrible.
The Columbine/Santee phenomenon isn’t caused by guns, nor is it caused by bullying. It’s caused by a national epidemic of inability to Get Over It.
