bullied

Music: Sennen: Lost Harmony (2012)

The freckled-faced new kid in eighth grade had tussled hair that seemed like a hospitable bed for lice. I didn't wear hand-me downs like he appeared to wear, but only because I was an "only child," I guess, and we didn't have a Goodwill. Yesterday's Walmart---a chain called Richway---had the cheaper generic brands anyway ("why advertise for a clothing company? Be an individual," my dad used to say to justify my wearing the social markers of "uncool"). Two years prior, when I was in sixth grade, I convinced my mom to buy me some red, Converse high-tops. The fad came and went, and for a few months I felt like I "fit in," that going to Middle School was akin to hitting the reset button on the Nintendo, that I could "blend" and be "cool." By seventh grade my fear was back to normal (a kid named Dustin started bullying me), and by eighth grade I was starting to find my people (skaters) and adopting my own style.

The gradual embrace of my difference in eighth grade entailed a certain risk; although there would be no question about who I was---it's not like I could blend in anyway---my conspicuousness marked me as a target for new social tests. The new boy, the freckled one, probably didn't want to beat me up. But he knew he had to go through with it when the teachers mysteriously disappeared, somehow, on the long march from the field back to the school building.

"Kick that faggots ass! Do you want to be a pussy like him?" rang out from the cowards who didn't want to do it themselves. "Fuck that faggot up!" was a familiar, commanding chant from the bullies who never really ever got physical and the fat kid who, surprisingly, would when provoked. Like the new kid. I can still hear their high-pitched boy voices, and girls screaming, pretending to be frightened by the spectacle of the new kid trying to bash my head into a large, barely unearthed rock near the ball field. I remember seeing the rock approaching my face, the rush of adrenaline that helped me move my head to an impact on the grass. And I remember losing badly, or so it seemed. The "fight" (or better, "attack") was broken up by a teacher I didn't know who came out to investigate. I remember the initial, accusatory tone of the assistant principal (I had caused a ruckus just a year prior by circulating a petition by the "Student Liberation Army" to allow chewing gum in school). I remember the next day, too, when the kid who assaulted me got in trouble and I was "absolved" of the initial charge of provocation; I had a few bruises, but the freckle-faced kid looked like a wreck the next day, with big black eyes. The eighth grade consensus was that I "lost the fight," but the proof of flesh suggested otherwise. Either that, or the kid got beat up by his dad when he got home.

This was not the last time I was "in a fight." I had only once started one: in seventh grade, with a best friend, and we figured out mid-tussle it was a bad idea. I had never provoked a fight prior or since. Apparently I have erased from my memory the numerous times I arrived home roughed- or beaten up. I know I was pulled out of preschool because a girl had it out for me; my mother says she bit me every day and drew blood and, when posed with the choice to stay with my grandmother at the age of five or so, I chose grandmother (and a years-long, bordom-dripping tutoring in soap operas, General Hospital and Days of Our Lives especially.) My father said he once paid a visit to the home of a child who routinely beat me up on the bus (by his account, my father showed up with a firearm and threatened the kid's dad). I dimly remember this, and was glad to know my dad didn't tell me his "solution" at the time because, you know, the "lesson" is not a good one. And I definitely remember getting picked on in church---a lot---and the "Sunday school teacher" turning a blind eye.

I do remember that my childhood---my existence all the way through high school---was synonymous with bullying, even if I have repressed all of the instances. I got out of Georgia and away from my "home" for a reason, and its crown is "trauma." I don't want to overly dramatize my experience, but I do see in retrospect how formative being picked-on and beaten up has been for me; it's in my teaching, it's in my scholarship, it's in the food I like to give away to friends.

The eighth grade attack was the last time I remember having to fight alone, the last time I remember feeling hopeless or like no one was looking out for me. In high school I found my friends, my "group," my clique: alternative kids and mods and goths and skaters and the one queer kid a grade ahead. The 1980 film My Bodyguard also inspired, I suspect, my befriending of a couple of guys who scared the shit out of most people (in all grades); one of them is still a friend to this day. Even though I figured out ways to surround myself with the comfort and, sometimes protection, of friendship, the bullying never stopped. At 39 years of age, I still experience it. Rarely. But I do smell it occasionally.

At home, I am still a "faggot," that weird kid who got out and did ok, but who is still "not of us." At my ten year high school anniversary in 2002, I was to give a speech because I was class president of my graduating class. My speech was about how we had now become adults and have the advantage of seeing beyond the group divisions that once structured our teenage world. I said the reunion was the time for us to take advantage of adulthood and to actually take the time to talk to and meet others from our class whom we were too afraid, or simply not allowed, to talk to. I was booed to silence and decided not to finish my speech. The hired DJ had to interrupt the booing, like a parent, telling these 20-somethings to "show some respect" (that is, to "behave"). This summer is our twentieth reunion and a few folks have asked me to come. I pleaded Bartleby, the Scrivener.

In college, I discovered that I really "fit-in" for the first time in my young life. I suspect this is one of the reasons I've never really left. Today I'm no longer called a "faggot" or a "pussy" (after all, an overwhelming number of us identify as queer; we "have the hegemony," as it were). Now the terms usually---though rarely---used are "weird" or "eccentric" or (I think with some affection) "crazy." But there's bullying here too, and when it goes down I can always sense it, hearing an echo of those kids nudging on freckle-face to bash heads open on rocks.

In higher education, bullying sometimes happens in scholarship---usually at the keyboard of a junior scholar---when s/he attempts to "take 'em down" in scathing barbs and accusations of "misreading." I don't mean to implicate the critical agon (think Adorno), but rather, the ad hominem. This kind of bullying rarely goes to print, although I can point to some notable exceptions in which I have personally (and I mean to the person) taken a beating.

Other types of bullying seem to take place in that deep space between faculty, staff and "the administration," a sort of Westworld of mass mediated threats in which Reavers---in the form of well-meaning "think tank" do-gooders, often self-described as "conservatives"----attempt to intimidate with threats of publicity ("Can you believe Prof. Jones teaches a class on Elvis? Where's the accountability!"). There's also the bullying and intimidation that can occur in employment negotiations (unions play both offense and defense here).

The point of these memories, where they converge, is the second great disappointment of adulthood. The first great disappointment is that "love is not enough," of course. The second is that adults are simply kids with experience. Some childhood bullies "grow out" of their sadism, learning to deal with the insecurities we all experience in better, non-violent ways (having children of their own seems to help). Some do not. I fantasize these become high school football coaches and policemen in rural areas, although I realize that's a gross generalization based on my limited experience. And, perhaps the worst adult children are those who were bullied and then "grow up" to continue the cycle of abuse, either by inviting routine victimization or becoming bullies themselves (how many mean academics do you know who were beaten up on the playground?).

The second disappointment of adulthood is on painful display in the documentary Bully, which I screened yesterday. The film was well-done, and its message definitely needs to be heard, but I thought the film too frequently pulled its punches. It made me weep and quickly brought back the memories I've shared here. And those memories lead me to think that the brutality the film was attempting to "expose" was mistakenly eclipsed in scenes of mourning and outraged parents. I thought the film missed an opportunity to examine the lives of the bully: why does a bully bully? Isn't this really the source of the problem? Isn't preventing someone from becoming a bully the real issue here, not so much a call for more policing? Schools are already run like prisons, they certainly look like them. And we know what the prison system does to "criminals," right? (Not to mention the execution of the innocent.) I think the film wrongly focuses attention on the failures of "adults" to punish bullies instead of zooming in on the likely locus of the problem: family life, poverty, entitlement, the lack of basic resources and health care, the "feed him a pill for his behavior" approach to acting-out, and so on.

To be sure, our teachers and school administrators are increasingly asked to do more with less, and I have a number of friends who are or were teachers with unbelievable stories of hardship and politics. The rabid politicization of education is not only a cause of problems, but also reflects a deteriorization of familial authority (ask any teacher, and you'll hear stories of abusive, non-involved, irresponsible parents). Why are schools becoming a political battleground? Because we're asking them to parent our children. Let me be very clear here: I have more sympathy for the hardworking, caring teachers and administrators of secondary and primary education than the film allows me to feel. Teachers and school administrators have it bad. Period.

That said, the film does a very good job of showing precisely how not to "deal" with the problem of bullying in the figure of Kim Lockwood, an assistant principal in Sioux City. Lockwood has a number of memorable scenes, two of which inspired me to yell out "you idiot!" in the theatre (one person clapped, in solidarity with me). In one of these scenes, Lockwood pulls aside two boys from the playground; one was picking on the other. Mrs. Lockwood demanded that they shake hands and "get along." After the bully does so and leaves, she takes to chastising (!!!) the bullied boy, who reveals his parents called the police and on the bully and that the bully was told to avoid him. As Lockwood interacts with the boy trying desperately not to cry, clearly feeling accused and without advocate, she says a series of callous and dismissive things to him. It's truly horrible. In another scene the parents of an adorable and sweet kid come to see Lockwood; the filmmakers catch the boy being physically beaten on the school bus and the spectator is led to understand they broke with verite protocol and showed the film to the boy's parents and administrators. Lockwood appears false and the subtext at her failed attempts to soothe the parent's concerns is that "kids will be kids." To prove her sincerity, she shows the parents a photograph of her grandbaby in what comes off as the most ignorant and narcissistic gesture in response to the parents' concerns and pain. I left the theatre wondering if this woman was fired, as apparently numerous others have also wondered.

Kim Lockwood is a human being, and no doubt editing can create impressions that are false. Even so, it's clear the filmmakers believed she was soulless. She's precisely the kind of "authority" I remembered hating growing up.

The implication of this film is that somehow, in our time, bullying is getting worse. I don't think that's true; I suffered the same---sometimes worse---bullying depicted in the film. It is all painfully familiar. The ways in which teachers and administrators help to facilitate bullying have also not changed (I remember a series of Mrs. Lockwood's and also the insinuation my difference provoked this or that "all American kid." You know, "your skirt was too short." I dealt with that by actually wearing a skirt to the club as an underage partier, but that's another story for another time).

I'm saying that there was as much need for training and awareness by teachers and administrators thirty years ago as there is today. I think as a culture we are becoming less tolerant of hatred.

Still, the responses to bullying---suicide, taking weapons to class, and as Columbine brought to our attention so vividly, killing perceived bullies or acting-out fantasies of mass slaughter---the responses to bullying are what appear to be different in our time. Those responses are indeed gestures of desperation, and of course the ubiquity of weapons in the United States doesn't help. Educational authorities do not necessarily need to police better (although the film does document a need here). Educational authorities need the training to stop bullying before it starts, by knowing how to read the structural and cultural causes that inspire violence. The answer is not "you're too sensitive," "you need to suck it up," or "you need to fight back." The answer is asking the right questions: why is sadism an answer for the bully, and why is that answer appealing?

Well, I've written much more than I had intended. I guess this topic hits too close to home. If you're reading this, I suspect it hits somewhere in the vicinity of home for you too. If it doesn't, consider yourself lucky. If it doesn't, at some level, I guess envy you.

I wish for a hippy's conception of the way the world could be for all young people.