On Bullying.

I’ll admit from the beginning that this is going to be a stream of consciousness “essay,” so I’m not entirely sure where it’s gonna go. I may or may not edit it before posting,* but I wanted to be able to speak my peace as I figured out my feelings. Multi-tasking, folks - it’s a great way to put your foot in your mouth.

So there’s a big movement right now to stop bullying. From my shallow understanding of the evolution of the cultural meme, it began with the very noble “It gets better” campaign, which I truly do admire. From there, it extended to all aspects of bullying, across many different ideas, until it became sort of a generalized “Stop bulling” campaign.

Somehow, I find myself objecting to this, and I’m going to do my best to explain why. It may not be what you think.

I was bullied as a kid. A lot. I was small, and shy, and therefore vulnerable. I was targeted early and often, from grade school through 3/4 of high school. I’m a september born, so I was almost always the youngest in the class, and since I was a late bloomer, it also meant I entered high school at 4’6”.

Now I’m not “better for having been” bullied, nor do I consider it a learning/growing experience. I do think it’s inherent to almost any social structure, because humans are still very much pack animals. As teenagers sort out who’s the alpha, it sort of requires the denigration of others down the social structure.

Now, as I said above, I don’t think I’m better for having been bullied. It was awful and involved more than a little emotional and physical trauma. I fit well into most industrial trash cans, was told rather frequently that I wasn’t allowed to sit in certain areas, and one time was pulled behind a building by a gun that had someone attached to it’s trigger (in my head, that’s how I remember it - gun first, human second.)

So why do I not agree with the “Stop Bullying” comments? Because at some point I stopped the bullying. I want to reiterate again that this isn’t a “I’m better for having to have solved my own problems” issue, this is a “when I stopped it, I may have helped other people too.”

There’s a scene early on in Ender’s Game where Ender realizes that the only way to stop a bully wasn’t just to make him back off, but to make him too scared to even try it again. Ender knew that by just defusing the encounter, he was setting himself up for revenge at a later time, where he would likely be surprised and more injured. He didn’t just need to win, he needed to go so far that this person would never bother him again.

Junior year of high school, after three years of being bullied by the same guy, I finally got tired of it. At lunch one day, I caught a pudding cup to the face. Unopened, but still. I sat there, head ducked.

“Bring it back, pussy.”

I sat there, doing my best impression of something that could wilfully disappear from existence.

“Hey, pussy. Bring me back my fucking pudding.”

I sort of snapped. I would not be party to my own humiliation. Not anymore. So I brought it back. And when I was five feet away, I whipped it as hard as I could at his head.

He ducked far quicker than I expected, and it splattered against the brick behind him.

“Pussy wants an ass-beating.”

He and his four friends stood up, and he got nose to nose with me, despite him being somewhere between 6 and 9 inches taller. His friends ringed us, expecting the fight. I stared at him until my eyes watered, and just as I was expecting to be knocked out, a teacher walked by. He stepped away, mumbling to himself about the next time, making sure we wouldn’t be interrupted, and I walked off - shaking from a combination of fear, anxiety, and adrenaline.

Later that day, second to last period of the day, I was in English class. He was seated behind me. I didn’t like having my back to him for an hour, but it was assigned seating so there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. He spent most of the period lifting the front of his desk over the back of mine, and rammed it into my back at periodic intervals. For a half hour I just sat there and ignored him. But I knew I had to do something. For some reason, when I walked up to the teacher’s desk to pick up a paper, I decided it was then.

So in the middle of Junior year English class, I calmly walked back to my desk, and then just past it. I stared at him and as he stared at me with a questioning look, I grabbed the bottom of his desk and flipped it over on top of him. He hit the ground, confused, and for the first time I saw fear in his eyes.

“Try it again, motherfucker,” I screamed, my voice inevitably cracking. “Try fucking with me again!”

The entire room was silent. I had just assaulted another student in the middle of fifth period English, and I was now standing over the top of him for all the world to see. I was pretty sure expulsion was next on my to-do list. I sat down at my desk, his still flipped behind me. I was shaking again, for the same reasons as before.

“Looks like Barrett got tired of your shit,” my teacher said, and then willfully forgot what he’d seen. It was never brought up again - by anyone - and I never got punished. I was never bullied again though - by him or anyone else at that school.

I suppose I should give some credit to my father here too, because of something he told me when I went home crying about what happened at school one day. “I’ll never let you start a fight,” he said, using this voice that he had which was both stern and comforting all at once. “But if someone else does,” he continued, “you damn well finish it.”

I finished the fight that day, not by putting that kid in the hospital, but by making him consider me a viable threat from then on. I didn’t grow any, and I wasn’t any stronger, but I wasn’t weak anymore.

So why am I against a message of Stop Bullying? Because I think it doesn’t go far enough. That alpha/pack mentality isn’t going to go away by having a bunch of distant people discourage it; it’s going to go away by having someone fight back. It’s going to go away by knowing you can get hurt in response, or that someone’s crazy enough to not give a shit about punishment. 

There wasn’t a single social campaign that could get that guy to stop bullying me - it took me forcing him to fear me. Only then did it stop. So when I read “Stop Bullying,” my immediate thought is “Yes, please. Let’s. But don’t say it, do it. Explain it in a way they’ll understand: with a fist, or a kick, or a kick to the groin.” 

I want to stop bullying as much as anyone. Trust me, I consider it an incredibly noble endeavor; but there are some things that can be discussed and there are some that cannot. If someone wants to humiliate you on a daily basis to impress his friends, nothing you post on facebook or hold on a sign will help. You need to confront them and assert your own humanity - and you may have to do so by force. Bullying doesn’t respond to compassion, it responds to fear. So you make them fear you instead of fearing them. 

That’s how you stop bullies - your turn the tables on them.


 

 

*Aside from swapping two paragraphs for clarity, I didn’t edit.

22 Notes/ Hide

  1. nslayton reblogged this from spytap and added:
    Despite my tendencies to panic and freak out...emotional background and history
  2. internetsabrina said: I want to hug the 5th period English you. Not out of pity though.
  3. ecantwell said: You’re a brave guy. I worry about the students who don’t feel physically able to “fight back” on their own. And so much bullying today isn’t physical; if you find awful comments written about you online, who can you physically confront?
  4. rosskraynak said: You have my empathy. Also, at first glance, I thought this was reblogged from Coketalk.
  5. jcg1013 reblogged this from spytap
  6. pberntsen reblogged this from spytap and added:
    Look, Bullying, everything we’re seeing in...just plain wrong. There is no need for it,...
  7. eatenstarr reblogged this from spytap
  8. likeit reblogged this from spytap and added:
    love Barrett. And...should, too. Or he’ll kick...ass....
  9. spytap posted this

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