I’ve been working on an article about bullying this week, and so of course I’ve been reminiscing about the people who were mean to me when I was in school.
I didn’t get picked on all that much, but whenever I did, I was baffled. What possessed these kids? What made them get up in the morning and say, “I’m going to go to school and be mean to people”? What were they thinking? And what, exactly, had I done to deserve such treatment?
“Just ignore them,” my parents would say.
Which was good advice, as far as it went.
Sometimes it really did make sense to ignore the mean kids. Sometimes they really did just get bored and find something else to do. Sometimes you simply found other ways to assert yourself — you did well in class, or in athletics, or band. During the brief yo-yo craze that swept my middle school, I wowed my classmates by performing tricks such as “rock the baby” and “around the world.” I’d learned these tricks on my own, long before yo-yoing became a fad, back when only a nerd like me would have been interested in it. I can’t say that being good with a yo-yo made me popular. But it did earn me a weird kind of respect.
As I advanced in school, my thinking on how to deal with mean kids gradually evolved.
When I was in seventh grade, we read the play “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” in English class, and it had a profound effect on me. The play details Henry David Thoreau’s stint in jail for refusing to pay taxes that supported slavery and the U.S. war in Mexico. Our teacher explained that Thoreau was a nonconformist, and that he was practicing something called civil disobedience. I’d never heard of these things before, but I decided that I wanted to be a nonconformist who bravely took unpopular stands. In my mind, this meant that I should stick up for myself and my friends whenever the mean kids harassed us.
So when one of our classmates persisted in making fun of us after school, I ran up behind him when he was riding away on his bicycle, grabbed him around the waist and threw him on the ground. He seemed genuinely startled. “Why did you do that?” he yelled. His confusion, quite frankly, amazed me. “Because you were being mean to us,” I said. “Why do you think?” Now, I don’t advocate violence, and I’d certainly never advise anyone to do what I did, and Thoreau probably wouldn’t, either. But my actions had the desired effect. From that day on, the boy left us alone.
If I’m telling stories about being picked on in school, the boy-and-the-bicycle story is the one I like to tell, because it’s funny and nostalgic and presents an image of myself that I like, where I’m tough and defiant and victorious.
The story I don’t like to tell is the one about the time I was giving an oral report in eighth grade, and two boys seated in the front row made nasty, distracting comments all through my speech, and eventually reduced me to tears. I was angry at those boys, but the person I was really furious with was the teacher. I just couldn’t believe that she hadn’t noticed what those boys were doing, but if she was really that oblivious to what was going on, then she had no business teaching eighth grade. What I remember most about the incident is my sense of injustice, impotence and shame. Even now, I still feel bad about it.
After reading about bullying all week, I’ve concluded that I was never actually a victim of bullying, because bullying refers to “intentional actions repeated over time that harm, intimidate or humiliate another person (the victim), and occur within the context of an imbalance of power, either real or perceived, between the bully and the victim.” I never experienced anything quite like that, but my heart goes out to all the kids who have, because there are far too many, and the effects can be severe. News reports indicate that the girls who committed suicide at Schenectady High had been bullied.
When I was in school, you were pretty much on your own when it came to dealing with bullies. But my research indicates that this has changed. Today, schools and educators believe that bullying is a serious problem, that adults should intervene, and that students should be taught to recognize bullying and report it. This seems like progress. I enjoyed middle school, but I probably would have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t worrying about the mean kids, and how to respond to their mean little attacks. The idea that I could tell an adult, and that he or she might help me, never crossed my mind.
I’ve also learned that bullies are troubled kids themselves, who often experience anxiety, depression, delinquency and criminality. Which makes me think about the first really mean kid I ever met. He was mean in elementary school, and just got meaner and meaner as time went on. I detested him. A few years ago, I heard that he had died in a fire. It seemed like the sad end to a sad life, and for the first time ever, I felt some compassion for him.
Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in The Gazette’s Saturday Lifestyles section.
