Bullying

One of the recent ways our locale made the national news was the case of the nine year old boy who had taken a gun from his mother's house and put it in his backpack. It went off in school, seriously injuring a girl in his class. She has a bullet lodged near her spine and is still in critical care after several days. The boy has been charged but is being put into some kind of treatment program. He was being raised by an uncle after his family situation pretty much melted down. He got the gun during a visit to his mother who no longer has custody of him.

The first question up for me is who keeps a loaded gun unlocked where a child can get it with a round in the chamber and the safety off? But that aside there are some other disturbing things about this case that echo other similar events. Police initially reported that the boy supposedly indicated that he got the gun for "protection" because he was planning to run away. Now it comes out that in addition to his really shitty family situation he was getting bullied and had been suspended not long before after an incident in which some other kids "jumped" him and a friend after school. The school in its unselective bureaucratic "don't make me have to really solve this" wisdom simply suspended everyone involved. At which point the bullies threatened retaliation. The gun was taken for self-protection.

I'm not justifying the gun. Please don't think that.

But if you think bullying "is just part of growing up," I say bullshit.

In almost all of these kid perpetrated gun violence in schools incidents it eventually comes out that the kid had a history of experiencing bullying. In addition in many of the teen suicides it comes out that some kind of bullying was involved. Sometimes like the cyber-bullying case last year or the year before it actually involves an adult.

But here's my point today. Even if adults aren't directly involved, they are invariably complicit in allowing it to happen. I spent most of my teens getting bullied until I ended up for one year in a school that didn't accept it as the way things were.

Adults, teachers, administrators, whoever--in the past at least, adults didn't want to get involved and they typically made that plain to any bullied child who complained of it. Parents, often engaged in their own tsouris either don't want to get involved or aren't paying much attention. Trust me. I was one of them. Despite my own experience I was unaware that my oldest was having the same experience even though he was coming home and taking it out on his younger brother... (get this) for years. One of my most embarrassing things as a parent is to have learned this in the last few years.

Adult intervention is often simply absent, three monkeys style (see no evil, etc.). Often it is minimalist--"That's just the way things are. You have to learn how to handle it." Frequently it is indiscriminating as in the everyone involved gets the same treatment and it is to suspend rather than to counsel or advise or teach. I knew I never could count on adults to help me, not even my parents for a variety of reasons regular readers might appreciate. I knew I would be seen as the troublemaker if I complained. "Shoot the messenger" starts early in life.

What you do is you learn to avoid it. You find new routes out of school and home. You know what groups to avoid going near. You learn to be a little sneaky and operate in the seams. You still get caught. I was in my second year of high school when I became the target of a nineteen year-old who was in his third year for the third time--a really shining example of suthren amurican manhood. He would hunt me down outside of school even on weekends in order to pummel me. One of my problems was that once caught I would not back down. "Go ahead, hit me if it makes you feel big." Once I'm pretty certain I was concussed. Didn't let my mother know. What could she do? She had her own health issues which were killing her and was working 13 days out of 14 to keep things together.

So you avoid, and you probably fantasize or day dream about getting revenge or justice. I know I did. I've talked to a few others who had similar experiences, and they did, too. Mine were heroic dreams about how bad guys invaded the school, did in my nemesis, and then I somehow was involved in saving the day. Kills two birds with one stone, so to speak--gets rid of my problem and makes me popular.

The difference is that most kids who get bullied don't act on it in one of the negative ways. They don't plan to shoot up their school. They don't actually commit suicide. They pay a price to be sure, one that requires them to do some healing as an adult. One of Sheldon Kopp's Eschatological Laundry List is the line: "Childhood is a nightmare."

Still, I think it is great that more and more effort is being put into anti-bullying programs in schools. More of it couldn't happen soon enough as far as I am concerned. Most of the schools I knew as a teen ( I went to a few) were only a few notches removed from "Lord of the Flies." The kid culture in them was something adults actively avoided and some pretty horrific stuff went down. Despite some injuries nobody died, but there are times looking back that I wondered how we all survived.

Counter to all this is another local news thing gone national: Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project to help youth of all persuasions but especially LGBT youth understand that there is life after high school, life where you don't get abusively teased for who you are or beaten up or ostracized. Maybe this is part of my "It Gets Better" statement.