This is another one of those subjects that’s worth a whole book on its own. And, as much as I don’t want you to think I’m trivializing it by including it with stuff about, what . . . public nail clipping and cell phone yakkers . . . I trust you to be smarter than that. Because I believe you are. This book is all about behavior that bothers us. How can I not include a chapter on behavior that goes beyond that? Bullying goes way past peeve. But it’s still bad behavior. And it’s too much on my mind not to share here with you.
Now, I’ve always known that there were bullies in the world. We’ve seen a lot of it in politics lately as well as in daily life. You see it where people who may be stronger, or bigger, or better with verbiage than other folks . . . show off. To me, that’s what bullying is, showing off. It’s saying, I’m better than you, I can take you down. Not just physically, but emotionally.
I’m pretty sure a lot of teenage bullying comes from seeing adults and how they act around other people. How they put themselves out there. And I think that’s where adults are involved . . . as poor examples to kids.
And for some reason, there seems to be no internal policeman for a bully that says maybe you’re hurting somebody’s feelings. Or worse, maybe you’re going to push this person too far and they’ll do something terrible. Something’s not processing correctly in a bully’s head. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that what they’re doing is crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed. And it’s really, in my mind, no different than taking on defenseless kids. You do it just because you know you can.
It’s an exercise in power, but it’s also meant to disintegrate someone’s Self. It’s meant to take away their sense of who they are. And why? Because they’re not as strong, or as big, or as witty.
Bullies are ball-less, soul-less creatures to me. And they’re not just children, they’re adults too. And have you noticed how they only bully people who won’t fight back? You never see bullies try to bully other bullies. No bully wants to get his ass kicked. That’s why so much of what they do . . . they do anonymously. Like throwing bricks through windows. That’s bullying. Spitting on somebody is bullying. Yelling out “faggot” is bullying. And then they never stick around for the person to see them.
It’s a terrorist act.
It’s meant to make you feel afraid. It’s meant to make you feel powerless to take care of the situation you find yourself in. And even when you try to, not enough adults take bullying seriously. Know what’s clear to me? People don’t realize that bullying has come so very far since many of us were little kids. Back then, if you ran into a bully, you could go get your big brother or big sister.
Today, you’ve got cyber-bullying. Cyber-bullying is different. First of all, it’s very cowardly. The bully can choose to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. And when bullying happens on the Web, it has no boundaries, so it’s even more emotionally and psychologically charged. If you are the victim . . . you can’t leave it behind at the bus stop or the hallway or the cafeteria. It’s everywhere, and that’s what I think makes cyber-bullying so much worse. It continues after the school day—and it gets broadcast.
Before the days of the Web and social networks, when you were getting bullied at school, it was just the kids at school who knew. But not kids in other schools. Not a million people around the world reading these things about you on the Internet.
And there’s no way to combat the lie or fight the ugly once it’s put out there. The ugly stays forever like a bad fart. It’s always there. And you can’t get it off the Internet.
I believe adults should step up and do more to stop this. But it’s not getting done. Why is it that a kid can come and tell parents and teachers that this is happening, and everybody agrees it needs to stop—but nobody
does
anything? It reminds me of a famous New York news story from back in the mid-1960s. A young woman named Kitty Genovese was walking home from work one night, and she was attacked and stabbed. And she screamed and screamed and screamed. Her entire neighborhood heard it. Nobody helped her. A similar thing happened more recently in the Bay Area where a high school girl was gang-raped outside her school dance. A crowd of people stood by and nobody helped her.
What is missing that helping isn’t even a second thought in people’s minds?
What does a victim of bullying need to do to be heard? I mean, what better way is there to be heard than to walk up to the adults who are there in school to help the situation? Beyond that, where is there protection? If the adults don’t give a damn, where are we?
I hear stories now that teachers are being bullied by students too. A common complaint is that they are told by kids right there in their classroom to fuck off. Well, here’s a very good way to deal with them. If you say fuck off to a teacher in school, you get suspended. It’s that simple.
It’s like a child who won’t behave on the train, and the mother quietly says, “Stop that. Quit it. Put that down . . . I’m coming over there . . .” And then the misbehaving continues and she does nothing. If you’re going to deal with kids, you have to be ready to
deal
with them. You have to follow through and there have to be consequences.
I don’t understand when it became OK for the kids to tell adults the rules. What does it say about us? What are we telling the kids? We talk all about the forms incivility takes today. I see bullying as the clearest example of how incivility is running amok.
I put a lot of it on the adults. You know, adults from just a generation or two ago would not have put up with that crap. If somebody came to 90 percent of those adults and said, “I’m getting bothered all the time, they’re messing with me, and I’ve tried ignoring them, I’ve tried to fight back, and, you know, I’m
despondent
. . .” those grown-ups would have listened. Most adults back then would say, “OK, we’re going down to that school right now and find out what’s happening. And I’m going to talk to so-and-so’s mother.” And the kid would, of course, say, “No, no, don’t do that! It’ll make it worse.” But the parent—the responsible parent—would say, “Well, I am going to talk to
somebody
and get to the bottom of this.” It simply would not have been taken so lightly when a child came to you and said something was wrong.
And the adults in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where that bullied fifteen-year-old-girl committed suicide, seemingly were aware of it . . . So what the hell?!
You cannot ask children to respect anything if you’re not going to respect it. If a kid comes to you and says, “I’m really having a tough time here,” and you don’t respect that enough to follow through, what is that saying to the
other
kids? It’s telling them that nobody cares. It says to kids that they’re out there on their own. And, as we have seen too many times, if you think you’re out there on your own, and you think there’s only one way to go, you kill yourself. And sometimes, other people.
And kids are not the only ones victimized by bullies. You can be thirty-five and messing with a bully. Bullies are bullies at any age or any place. But whether it’s in school or at work, bullies are not acceptable. And that’s something everybody has to just get on top of.
It’s hard, I know it, but if you are a kid who is being bullied and harassed, here is what I want to say to you: I would find some grown-up who would listen to me and I’d make as much noise as I could. For me, there comes a time when it’s
enough
.
It’s the same in relationships, whether it’s adults or if it’s kids, where that person has that much power over you. So much that they can dictate what you’re going to be doing. That’s too much power to hand over to somebody. I feel very strongly that adults have to take a step back and take a look at this.
Please. Take a look at what it means.
What would it mean to you if someone bullied you at work? What would you do if you discovered on the company computer server that someone was spreading lies about you? But you can’t figure out who it is. And people are giving you looks, and all that. And it’s making your life miserable so you can’t work, let alone sleep or eat. That’s when you have to get up on top of the desk and go, “OK. I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! I’m
not
going to do it!” It’s OK to get mad and snap. It’s not OK for someone to use someone else as a way to get their beans off.
The question is, why have people become so emboldened? Is it because the crowd that witnesses all this doesn’t try to stop it? But that doesn’t necessarily mean they like what the bully is doing. It could be that they are afraid too. But how can one bully hold more power than eight or nine people together? What happens if the bunch turns on the bully? People use this excuse all the time. “Oh, I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want them to start bullying
me
.” Well, if you know that there are four other people who don’t like what’s happening, you have more power than the bully.
You have the power.
Besides kids getting examples set by adult bullies, what can we trace it back to? Is it what they see on TV? Is it the
Housewives of New York
, or
Beverly Hills
, or wherever? Is it Rush Limbaugh? Is it Keith Olberman? Is it these shows on TV like
Gossip Girl
, where the kids are just plain nasty? They’re nasty about each other. They’re nasty about other people who they perceive to be lower in the world than they are. They’re characters with no redeeming qualities. Why are we OK with that? Why don’t we like people with redeeming qualities? When did that change? Maybe people with redeeming qualities are boring. But fewer people hurt themselves because of boring people, even though they’re not “hot.”
But ask yourself this. Are you actually hot when you’re an asshole? Because it’s basically what you are when you’re a bully.
I think that both as kids and adults you kind of have to make a decision. How far are you willing to lie down for somebody? And as a parent, you cannot
be
your kid. You can’t bring that vibe into the house like it’s OK, we don’t need to say anything.
Yeah, you do. You need to make noise when something is wrong.
But at the same time, that doesn’t give you the right to be a bully yourself. If you look in the mirror and say, I’m getting bullied by somebody, therefore, I can bully, there’s a problem and you could be looking at it in the eyes.
I don’t exactly know how many bullies were once bullied themselves. It depends, I guess. If they got out of school and said, “That’s never going to happen to me again, I’m going to go on the offensive,” they could become bullies. If they got out of school and they said, “Oh my God, my life is always going to be like this,” then, I suppose, they lie down.
But I have to say, in my opinion, if you’re watching on the little kids’ playground and you see your kid is a potential bully, that’s when you have to nip that in the bud. It’s not cool because there’s your son—with his little penis and you with your big penis—and you think, yeah, he’s standing up for himself.
Is he?
You may feel proud and say, “He’s a fighter, that one.”
Yeah, but who is he fighting? And who are you? What are you representing to your child? Again, it comes back to what makes this OK. When did it change that there was no policeman in your head saying, “You know what? That’s really not a good way to go.”
Is this going on because faith in the system at large has failed? Is it because people figure they’re going to get theirs while the getting’s good? Or thinking, nobody’s gonna stop me?
But why not? Are teachers that busy? . . . Or are they that scared?
But then what? It’s just lawless.
If you’re not going to stand up and say, “
No fucking more
,” not one more kid is going to have to go through this, then who is going to stand up? And if you, as a teacher, don’t feel like you’re strong enough to be in that classroom—because that’s part of the teaching profession, to teach young people that this is not acceptable behavior—then maybe there’s a better profession for you. And that’s the bottom line of it, if you can’t do the job. ’Cause the job is not just the numbers and the words and the letters on the blackboard, it’s forming and shaping young people. Engaging them. And if you can’t engage them enough to keep them from beating each other up, then you have anarchy in the school.
If you’re afraid, and you know the kids are afraid . . . where do you go from there? Does it mean you have to make friends with the biggest, baddest dude on the football team? Maybe. Unless he’s the bully. Which he probably isn’t because he doesn’t have to be. And he doesn’t have the time.
Where
do
you go from there?
OK, here’s an idea. You start a club. You say to young kids, “Listen, this is a club that’s looking out for other students who may not have anybody walking with them. This is a club because when you get out in the real world you want to look after one another and you want to be looked after. You want to feel like somebody’s got your back. Let’s start it now.”
Also, there’s nothing stopping teachers from starting clubs like that for themselves to get some support. Have a teacher’s meeting and say, “Who’s afraid of their class? And can you identify the elements of your fear in your classroom? Who do you think is getting bullied? Who do you think is bullying?” Then you say, “OK, Mr. Principal, these are the kids we’re afraid of. So we’re going to start a new class—just for all of them. We’re having Officer So-and-so come in. And he’s going to take them to the penitentiary.”
It’s a field trip! It’ll be just like
Scared Straight
!
You want to let people see what bullying is like? Take them to the pen. And then see what real bullying is like.
And then you say to them, “Now, this is what you guys do. Whether you’re doing it on the Internet, or you’re doing it physically or psychologically, this is what you’re doing. Remember that feeling you had in the pen that he was going to mess you up? That’s what it’s like for other people with you. So put yourself in that other position. Now that you have been in that position, you know what it’s like. Do you want other people to feel this?”