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© Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
For a time, in grade school, my neighbor beat me up every day. After school, he waited for me, and beat me up. I was afraid of him, and cried, and he beat me up, and then I went home. I suspect that if I had fought back once, he would have respected me, and never beat me up again. Maybe. He was the best athlete in school. When I became an athlete myself, never among the best though, he became very friendly to me. I had become accepted.
Earlier than that, another neighbor, a girl, made me eat dirt. One day she said she was going to stab me, and she told me to wait right where I was. I waited in great fear, and she came back with a faky trick knife with a dull blade that disappeared into the handle.
Other than those events, I didn't experience much bullying. To my shame, I was once the perpetrator in such an event. I stole a friend's dessert, and he threw water in my face. Why did I bully this kid? I was self-centered. I needed that dessert (tapioca pudding), and my needs were more important than his needs. I was punished (somewhat) by water in the face. And I learned a lesson, but it took a while for me to really learn the lesson. I was still self-centered. At first I had just learned to not bully because it was ugly, degrading to both of us, and didn't work. I had not yet learned much empathy for my fellow humans.
The bully has power over another human. And that power is very attractive for some people. One thinks of Nazis having life and death power over Jews. Or the American soldiers at My Lai, having life and death power over Vietnamese women and children. Or people who abuse animals. Or criminals of all kinds.
Roadrunner:
Of course there is too much violence on TV and elsewhere. But Roadrunner is fun to watch. Wile E. Coyote is the bully (he intends to be), and Beep Beep is the victim. And we see the intended victim win every time. We like to see that. Justice prevails. And eventually we may begin to empathize with Wile E., plucky guy, always loses, but keeps on coming back for more punishment. Sure he would feast on Roadrunner (with relish) if he could, but that is natural for a coyote, he can't help himself. And he doesn't really get hurt, just a few stars coming out of his injury, and an excessive amount of bandages, and a crutch and a limp, or he may walk like an accordion for a while. Do you feel his pain when an anvil falls on him? Or when he falls off a cliff, or gets run over by a train? I guess we do feel some of that pain, and maybe that is why our surprise that he survives all of this strikes us as being funny.
Mel Brooks said that comedy is when you walk into an open man hole. Tragedy is when I have a hangnail.
John McEnroe:
John McEnroe was the best model for us amateur tennis players to emulate, because he was a finesse player at the beginning of today's power game. And yet he (along with Jimmy Connors) was a big baby who cheated, and I hated to watch him. He taught kids to throw their rackets and to verbally abuse their elders (the officials). I say he cheated; he flew into raging abusive tirades toward umpires, for minutes at a time. His opponents stood or sat helplessly watching these tantrums. McEnroe came away from this pumped and ready to win. And his opponent was now flat; McEnroe had broken his opponent's rhythm. The opponent should have been tougher, and defeated McEnroe anyway, even though McEnroe was cheating.
Why would McEnroe cheat, besides being a big baby? Because he had been cheated, by a bad line call probably. McEnroe was self-centered enough to think that it is OK to cheat when you have been cheated. The referee cheated me (benefitting my opponent, the bum), so I can cheat my opponent. It evens the scales. Do we believe that? I don't (well, I do, to some extent, now that I think about it).
O. J.
O. J. killed his former wife and her boy friend, it would seem. Bullying? Probably. Then he tried to commit suicide, and then he tried to get away with his crime. We are told that sports promotes good values, work hard, play fair, shake hands when you lose or win, etc.
Well, when you commit a crime, you don't admit it, you don't show remorse. And if you have lots of money, from sports or from whatever, you can get away with murder. Certainly O. J. learned great values from sports, values that kept him out of jail. And we learn these values from O. J.
Columbine:
On April 20, 1999, two students (reportedly the victims of bullies) at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed 13 other people and then killed themselves.
Let's re-enact my own past experience of bullying. My neighbor is waiting to beat me up. But this time I have a gun. Would I use it? Would I threaten him with it. Pretend that I pull the gun and threaten him, "Back off or I'll kill you." Does that work? It complicates things; I have escalated the situation from a "safe" case of assault and battery (a felony) that he was guilty of, and it is now assault with a deadly weapon (a felony) that I am guilty of. And later, when I don't have the gun, will he beat me up again. If he is smart, he won't. But it may actually escalate further to murder. The gun was not a solution. Neither is suicide; I never considered suicide, by the way.
My friend:
A friend of mine was repeatedly raped by her brother (a bully, obviously). Eventually, she took after him with a sharp butcher knife, failing to kill him or even wound him. And he never raped her again. Is that the logical solution?
I'm not sure what the solution is. The bully needs to not be a bully. He/she needs to be taught to be less self-centered and selfish. And the victim needs to not be a victim. The victim needs to stand up to the bully. Should the victim beat the bully? Or should the victim stand up to the bully and keep standing up, seemingly forever?
The criminal:
I have read that bullies are much more likely to become violent criminals than other children are. Of course, a bully is already a criminal. The violence and intimidation that he/she gets away with would gain him/her a prison sentence if he/she were older. Bullies are also much more likely to grow up to have children who become bullies. And a bully is much more likely to abuse family members, or commit date rape.