Bullies

I was bullied in the ninth grade. Mostly shoving, poking, “colliding” in the hall, taunting, name-calling – typical stuff. My bully did this for months. I kept cool until one morning when we gathered for class. He decided to try one more time. I simply reacted. I admit it wasn’t my finest moment. I literally threw the book at him – a geography book, I recall. It hit him, “thunk,” on the side of his head from several feet away. One of my friends picked up the book and placed it on my desk. The teacher arrived moments later. Curiously, no one “saw” anything. Apparently, the class thought the guy had it coming. Incidentally, he never bothered me again, and after a time, he showed some signs of respect.

I’ve seen what happens when bullies are not confronted. I also know about one who ended up in the emergency room after shoving his victim into walls, lockers, and bleachers for almost a year. Bullies often mistake restraint for weakness. They prod and provoke, hoping to win in a fight. Then if they lose, they blame their victim. This bully, who was punched in the face, of course tried to claim his victim “started it.” I think my provocateur was so surprised I could lob a book across the room he decided silence would be better than to admit a “band geek” got the upper hand.

Several of my relatives fought in WWII. All said things like, “We must stand up to Nazis.” There was no question then. We were the nation of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and people from many lands worked together to stop world-class bullies. It seems we had no taste for a “master race.” By the end of that war, there were many moments of pure “reaction,” when stopping the enemy was all that mattered. Wars are strewn with such moments.

While a friend can bring out the best in us, a bully can turn us into someone we don’t want to be. We might end up questioning who we have become. The fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hardly our nation’s most humane moments. However, they were arguably necessary to defeat bullies that produced many horrible moments of their own.

There are several reasons I can’t tolerate bullies. First, bullies often make it their mission to see how far they can go, how much misery they can cause, before their victims finally give up. Second, bullies do not accept responsibility for their actions, much less apologize, unless there is no other alternative, and even then, they are half-hearted about it. Third, bullies claim victory, regardless of the outcome. And bullies blame others for what they have done. Some even claim to be “just following orders.”

None of this is an attempt to psychoanalyze bullying. I was raised to take responsibility for my actions, to say, “I’m sorry” when I’m wrong, and to realize I’m not the center of the known universe. Apparently, some people don’t share this experience, for whatever reason. They want to win, even if everyone around them must lose. It seems to me it’s a character flaw to diminish others to feel good about yourself.

Perhaps the worst thing about bullies is that they in some sense believe they are better than others. There would be no one to bully if others were considered their equals. In every bullying case I can think of, some individual or group was considered “inferior.” Bullying, after all, is a form of tyranny, and vice versa. Irrational class distinctions, chattel slavery, internment camps, banning of brown people, persecution of immigrants – all of these qualify as bullying. All proceed on the assumption that some people are better than others.

Before anyone retorts that “illegals” deserve to be treated worse than everyone else, please consider the following: undocumented immigrants are people found on the wrong side of an imaginary line without the proper pieces of paper. That’s their “crime.” Now, if a person is guilty of harming another person’s body or property, they probably deserve to be treated as a criminal. Even then, they are constitutionally guaranteed due process rights. When rights are taken away on mere suspicion of breaking a law, this is tyranny, the state’s version of bullying.

Let’s go one step further. When “due process of law” becomes contingent on citizenship status, revoking one revokes the other. The doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” then becomes a quaint notion, dissolved in the attempt to “show ‘em who’s boss.” This is the majority tyranny Madison warned about. Our court system was set up to stand against bullying. Some seem to have forgotten the words of the Declaration of Independence. However, we all need to keep them in mind. If due process of law does not apply to every person in a country, there is no due process.

Abraham Lincoln had this to say: “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that all men are created equal a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie’.”

We must never assume we are better than others. The result of that kind of thinking will be that eventually someone will claim to be better than all of us. Then, there will be no recourse. All rights will be gone. The biggest bully will win.