It finally became too much after one exceptionally savage day. I went home after school and gobbled a full bottle of pills. I lost my nerve a few minutes later, made myself throw up, and drank as much water as my stomach could hold, but the drugs had already entered my system. For the next two days, I laid in a semi-delirious stupor which my mother believed was a bad flu. I did not tell her about what really happened that day until many years later, and have told very few others about it until now.
It is a national epidemic, and has been for a very long time. Search Google News under the word "bullying" and nearly six thousand stories appear. One such story, out of Tennessee, underscores the horrific consequences that can come from such unrelenting torment:
A lawsuit has been filed against Murray County Schools by a family who says bullying led to their son's suicide. Tyler Long committed suicide in October. The 17-year-old suffered from Asberger's Syndrome, a social anxiety disorder. His family, and their attorneys, say it was unbearable bullying at school that forced him to take his life. The lawsuit says the boy's parents made "countless efforts" to meet with school officials to discuss their son's safety at school due to the constant bullying.
The lawsuit says the school system violated the boys rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act, and that school officials exhibited "deliberate indifference" towards the bullying. In a Murray County school board meeting last year numerous families made similar complaints. Veronica Gearhart says her child is bullied as well.
"My baby is missing school because a gang of boys is waiting for him and it was reported to everyone and no one did nothing," she said.
Others like Carleen Mcatie worry about what might happen next. "It'll be like Columbine because it will have festered so long," said Mcatie. "Something needs to be done about it now, before something major happens in our school."
It is impossible to quantify the insidious effect the phenomenon of bullying has on our society. Those who bully can and do become monsters in adulthood, but all too often, those who are bullied can become equally monstrous. The mother in the story above said the magic word: Columbine. The Columbine killers were bullied, and lashed out against that bullying in a frenzy of violence that beggars imagination.
One of the ugliest aspects of my experience with being bullied is the fact that, nauseating as it sounds, I know exactly how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold felt; on many occasions, after I had been pummeled in the locker room before gym class, taunted by a Greek chorus of tormentors in the cafeteria, or been set upon in the bathroom, I would sit at my desk and fantasize about raking the room with machine gun fire to settle the score with those who found their fun through torturing me.
For a time, I carried a large knife to school because I needed some sort of equalizer in a world where violence waited around every corner and nobody in authority seemed to give a damn. I never found the courage to use that knife, thank God. But I could have. I remember wanting to, but I never did. Had I used it, I could very well have killed someone. Just brandishing it would have had dire consequences. I escaped my personal hell without lashing out violently. Harris and Klebold did not, and the simple truth is that bullying will eventually create more kids like them.
In the end, the perpetrators of bullying become indistinguishable from the victims. It is equally damaging to all involved. Take, for example, Dick Cheney, the most repellent public figure in modern American politics. It is easy to assume that he was a bully during his school days, given the manner in which he conducted himself in public office. But who is to say he was not the victim of bullying? It takes no great leap of logic to imagine how a person subjected to constant brutality can be transformed into a sadist by it, someone who reflexively needs to inflict the same pain they themselves endured. In the end, the bully and the bullied can, and all too often do, become the same noxious breed of monster.
What is the cause of bullying? Was it my fault that I became the object of so much terrible treatment? Was it the fault of those bullies, and the parents who so completely failed to raise them properly? Were the teachers and administrators to blame for allowing such unconscionable behavior to flourish under their noses?
Perhaps, I could have dressed better, been more socially adapted, but in the end, blaming the victim of bullying for getting bullied smacks of blaming a rape victim for getting raped. Responsibility for this phenomenon falls upon parents, who must raise their children to understand early in life that such behavior is abhorrent and forbidden. Furthermore, teachers and school administrators are duty bound to root out such behavior whenever it appears and deal with it seriously and severely.
Any teachers or administrators who claim ignorance or an inability to address this problem are lying through their teeth. I spent several years as a high school teacher and a dean, and know for a fact that it is nonsense to claim this problem is difficult to locate in a school environment. On my first day, I was able to spot which students were "in" and which were "out," and was immediately able to take steps to thwart bullying whenever it appeared within my sight or knowledge.
One of my proudest accomplishments as a teacher and administrator, in fact, came during my second year in the classroom. Like any group of students, my crew was divided between the "in" kids and the "out" kids. The "in" kids wore the right clothes, had the right looks and knew how to play the high school social game. The "out" kids were not as fashionable, not as physically developed and tended to get the best grades. Through slow and steady pressures, counseling conversations and meetings with parents, I was able to transform the social dynamic that separated "in" from "out." By the end of the year, my "out" kids were the most popular ones in class, and my "in" kids thought hitting the books and getting good grades were the keys to the coolness kingdom. This pattern held until the day those kids graduated.
Disrupting the patterns and social constructs that lead to bullying can be done. I know. I did it.
"The world breaks everyone," said Ernest Hemingway, "and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." I was broken, and deliberately so, day after day, week after week, year after year for five long years, until I could take no more and tried to break myself, finally and forever, to be free of it. I am stronger now in those broken places; in the process of making peace with that past, I finally came to the conclusion that all those years of wretchedness were the most important of my life. I came through that crucible a better person, sensitive to injustice and ever on the side of the underdog and the victim.
But that, in the end, is a rationalization. In truth, there was nothing good about what I was forced to endure, and the echo of it resonates within me to this day. Sometimes, I have nightmares. Sometimes, I react irrationally to seeming slights, especially if one of my many internal scars gets tweaked. For years, I was prone to depression, which led to self-medication through alcohol.
Ancient maps of the world once marked unknown regions of ocean with the words, "Here There Be Monsters." The phenomenon of bullying remains an unknown and unexplored region of our society, and this must change. Here, indeed, be monsters. I am still not fully recovered from my experiences, and may never be. I remember all the faces, and all the names, of those who tormented me during that time of unutterable darkness. I can never forget.
You see, I have this scar on my hand.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
