Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back -- For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
~Rudyard Kipling
I spent most of the day yesterday pondering the video of the school bus monitor who got bullied by some kids on the bus. My feelings fluctuated wildly from things like, 'now people can see what it's really like' to "this is just how society works, and if you take bullying away we will be lost as a people" to "we're only as weak as our strongest member," to "We're only as strong as our weakest member," to "lots of people who are bullied as children never grow up to be strong adults or find a good place in society. Many of them are always on their guard, ready to fight whether the threat they perceive is real or not. Society breaks its own members, then punishes them for being broken." to "Lots of people who are bullies as children grow up to be harsh adults because they've learned that this works for them." Do I know the truth of any of these thoughts? Not necessarily. When I was in therapy I learned to examine my thoughts and to know that a thought is not necessarily true because I thought it. Still. Not everyone figures out how to heal and move on. I'm living proof of that.
I was really reluctant to watch the bus monitor video, because I knew what it was going to be like. I finally did watch a couple minutes of it, and rather than being shocked, I felt a sort of "see, I was right" sort of moment. The thing that surprises me most is the shock and amazement that the media expresses. Like, did they not know this happens every day on school buses? Are newscasters pretending they didn't also participate in scenes like this, and that they didn't try to pummel their school's Omega into nonexistence? (I use the word Omega in this context even though the meaning I intend is the one that applies to wolves, whose social structure is chillingly similar to our own. I prefer it over human equivalents like "school geek" or "village idiot." I will also sometimes apply the term "head shy" to myself, even though it is an equestrian term. It mean a horse that's been hit in the face too many times, until it balks when anything, even a carrot, comes near it. I relate better to animals than I do to humans.)
A part of me wants to ask, what's the big fuss about? Nobody cared when this was happening to me every day on the bus. This is how human beings treat each other, especially children. This is how children are. And you can't protect a kid from other kids in a school situation. Everybody, everybody knows that. That's why adults used to chuckle indulgently when I would tell them I was being picked on during bus rides. Granted, it doesn't sound that bad when you put it that way. I didn't have the language skills to fully express what was happening, maybe. Adults must have thought I was just tattling.
And all of them must have thought it. Every teacher to whom I tried to appeal, the therapist my mother took me to, the school counselors, the principal, everybody. My mother told me that I just needed to learn to deal with it. I remember seeing a sign posted in my classroom about how everyone had the right to feel safe at school, and if you don't feel safe you should tell a teacher. I remember feeling the contemptuous, humorless smile on my face, knowing how profoundly apathetic those teachers were. I had an older sister who told me that I needed to come up with a good retort and find some way to throw the harshness back at the other kids, or I was going down when I got to high school. As an example, she told me about a kid in her high school that everyone hated, and the bullies had locked him in a garbage-filled locker for a three day weekend. He didn't get out until the janitor came in the morning school started up again, and after that he killed himself. So, that would be my fate if I couldn't get my shit together by the time I got to high school. I'm still working on finding creative ways to throw the harshness back.
But, why is it OK if this sort of thing happens to a ten year old girl, but not to a sixty-eight year old woman? I mean, the woman has decades of life experience behind her. Shouldn't she be able to handle this by now? When she was a young girl, she probably participated in the bullying. (See how I am? It's very Me vs. Them. Someone is either the bully or the bullied. And if she's never experienced bullying on this side of the equation before, she must have always been a bully up till now.)
Also, she's just going to get over it, right? She's had decades of practice leaving hurtful things in the past. She's survived childbirth. So how are a few punk kids going to do any harm? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. She's the adult in this situation. She'll get over it soon.
Well, probably not. Shayne gets so frustrated when he unexpectedly reaches out to smooth my hair back, and I flinch. I know I'm supposed to be over it by now, but I'm just not. I'm still on my guard. Seriously, where do bullies go when they grow up? Do they magically become nice people who play well with others? Those same children who raped their classmates with hairbrushes are now adults, walking around in public as if they belong here. It's not safe.
Last night when I was pondering the scenario, I worked myself up into a froth by imagining storming into my middle school, twenty years on, and insisting that I went to this school and I felt like I was in danger every damn day and nobody cared. you should just post signs that say "You're toast. Sink or swim." because that's what's really true. It didn't help to think that the school I attended twenty years ago must certainly have an entirely new faculty. None of the teachers there now are responsible for publicly humiliating me. But there is a new crop of kids, and they've picked out an Omega, and nobody sees anything wrong with that. On the contrary, they lash back at me when I try to ask them to care. What I need to do is just grow up and get over it.
The truth is that our culture thrives on bullying. No, really. It's true. Watch a show on the Disney channel and see how many times a character insults another character, right before the laugh track kicks in. Same thing for grown up sitcoms. Humans clarify their relationships with others and find their place in the pecking order by insulting each other. Take, for instance, Two And A Half Men, Charlie Sheen edition. The brother who does most of the bullying is the one who is most successful in life. The one who really wants to be a responsible person - well, he's imperfect. His marriage has failed, and he can't afford his own place because of all the money he lost in the divorce, so he's forced to live with the verbally abusive brother who constantly insults him. And it's high-larious. In some episodes, Charlie threatens Alan with physical harm if he doesn't get out of his house, and the laughs roll in.
That's just one example, but I find that most comedies follow the same pattern. The funniest part of the show are the zingers people throw back and forth at each other. Or, if you look at a slapstick comedy like The Three Stooges, the jokes are all about them physically hurting each other. None of it matters for the long term, and it's all in good fun.
But it's serious when a group of kids creates a similar scenario on a bus, with a monitor. Don't misunderstand, I'm not holding up sitcoms as a bad influence that will turn kids into bullies. Rather, I think human beings have an innate understanding that bullying is how they establish their place in society, and this is what causes us to enjoy the humor of sitcoms. The kids on the bus were just doing what comes naturally to them. Their parents do the same thing to gas station attendants and waiters. The bus monitor was unable to fight back, ergo, she sank to the bottom of the pecking order. Come on, guys. This is the society we believe in. Put a laugh track on that damn video. Hand the bullies some brightly colored beverages to throw on their Omega. (In my school, it was suckers. Kids would suck their suckers and then spit on me with tinted saliva to stain my clothes.) Afterward, everyone can sing a song.
In the end, I tried to give the adults in my life a pass. After all, I didn't have the language skills to explain how bad the bullying was for me. Also, this is how human society works. The child who cannot swim will sink, and that's how we establish which children are best suited to be part of society. The adult who cannot swim will also sink, and that's how we tell the future CEOs apart from the #destinedtobeawalmartgreeter.
But also, maybe the bus video showed things from a different perspective. When I worked at call centers, my bosses would often record my calls and have me listen to them, then we would discuss what worked and what didn't. My older sisters once called me into the room and struck up a conversation with me. After several minutes, they revealed that they had been taping our conversation the whole time, and they played it back for me so I could hear how stupid I sounded. I fled the room in tears, but I knew they were right. I did sound stupid. Sometimes when you hold a mirror up to a situation, its flaws are more easily recognizable than when the you were experiencing it firsthand.
I sometimes wonder if this is the key to understanding why we're all suddenly up in arms about bullying, whereas the adults I knew simply could not have cared less. In fact, bullying has been happening throughout history, and no one has ever had a problem with it. So what's the difference now? I think it's that kids are using video technology to record their bullying exploits and uploading it to the web so everyone can laugh. That never could have happened before this technology became commonplace. Maybe that bus video shows people just how bad the situation gets, and how powerless the Omega is to really fight back when a pack of children scents blood. We can all see how even an adult woman, who is a mother, can't hold her own when the bullying starts. Really, despite her decades of life experience, the monitor does the exact same thing I used to do when I sat on that bus. She cries and tells the kids they're being mean, at which point they lash back harder. Nothing is funnier than hurt feelings. But the result is that now even the people who are bullies can see how horrible they sound. And even if they don't exactly feel sorry, (is a bully even capable of human compassion?) they can at least see that society now disapproves of that level of cruelty, so they need to at least pretend to be sorry and back off a little.
But the truth is that bullying is not going to stop. Even as adults, our favorite blogs are those that make fun of others. By voting with our remotes, we make Judge Judy more popular than Oprah. Shows like The Weakest Link and Survivor illustrate how far a person can go by being harsh. My own personal favorite sports are hockey and roller derby. We reward athletes for being violent. And for me, my heart is not filled with love and compassion for my fellow humans. After failing to get over a childhood of bullying, a couple of months ago I googled one of my old teachers, the one who really, really, humiliated me in front of my classmates. I don't know exactly what I planned to do, but it involved a strongly worded letter. For reference, this is the teacher who called me a wimp and tried to wave me back outside after I came in seeking help because one of the kids on the playground had just knocked out my front teeth. I was bleeding at the mouth and she belittled me for not being tough enough. That's not the only time she kicked me when I was down, but it is the most glaring. That happened twenty-three years ago. I would estimate I spent about half an hour narrowing my searches, trying to find contact information on the school's website.
I googled my teacher at around the same time a child at my old school brought in a gun and shot another kid. I was not shocked, nor was I surprised. On the contrary, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. My fellow Americans, you have my mother's gun phobia to thank that I didn't have access to guns I could have taken to school. As a kid, I imagined a gun would have been a wonderful equalizer, and it would have reversed the polarity and placed the power squarely in my hands. At age ten I fantasized about taking a gun to school and just, you know, threatening the kids with it when they got too violent. This was before Columbine, before any kid shot another kid in a school. Based on the evidence I now see with my eyes, I think a video camera would have been a more powerful weapon.
So I guess my point is...maybe kids should have cell phones after all. Who knows? Maybe this will all cause us to evolve into a kinder sort of creature. Maybe when we can really see ourselves clearly, without any pretenses to nobility, we will learn how to really change.
