Bullying

I’ve been hesitant to write about this, because the tendency to indulge self pity creeps in around the edges.  But in the past year we’ve seen a rise in attention being paid to a great human tradition—bullying.

A gay youth outed by his peers committed suicide.  Other gays under a microscope all over the country have found themselves driven to the edge.  National “movements” to deal with this problem have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain.  The last time we witnessed this level of discussion about bullying was after a couple of disaffected youths murdered several of their peers at their high school and then took their own lives, leaving behind ample testaments that what had driven them to do this had been years of bullying.

A recent episode of Glee dealt with the subject, the lone out gay boy in the school having come under the daily assault by an oversized pituitary case who, for no apparent reason, had decided to make life hell for the outsider.

I suppose it was this episode that prompted me to write about this.  Because it indulged some pop psychology, which I stress is not baseless, to explain the bully’s behavior—he, too, was a closeted gay who hated himself for it.  The idea being that we hate that which we are which we cannot accept in ourselves.  Rather than deal with it  in ourselves, we direct the anger outward and target the reviled trait in others.  This, of course, has much to back it up.  Some of the most rabid Nazis in the Third Reich turned out to be deeply closeted Jews.

In the most extreme cases, this passes as an explanation for bullying, and it has the charm of comforting most of us that, really, it is aberrant behavior, that the majority of us aren’t like that.

Well.  Bullshit.

Bullying is a set of behaviors a great many kids do indulge at some point.  Most grow out of it, some never do it, but to suggest that it is tied in all cases to some deep-rooted self-loathing overlooks the psychology of the playground at a fundamental level.  To see why this is true, you have only to ask two questions:

One—if the vast majority of kids are not so afflicted and are not bullies, why doesn’t the majority stop the behavior in the one or two who indulge it?  It’s not like kids don’t come together in groups to control aberrant behavior in other ways.

Two—if the vast majority of kids are not themselves bullies or at least in sympathy with the bully, why is the victim the one scorned and blamed for his or her state by everyone in the group?

There’s an old term which seems to have fallen into disuse when applied to school yard behavior—pecking order.  Humans fall into hierarchical relations naturally.  One’s position in the group is determined by a wide range of traits and behaviors, but one thing is clear—no one wants to be on the bottom of the pecking order.  Those who are receive the fewest opportunities for positive interaction with the group.  To determine who the low-rung members are, tests are performed, and one of them has to do with ones ability to deal with the rough and tumble of school yard physical confrontations.  Bullies actually perform the function of policing the group to weed out the—to use a once-common term used in these situations—wusses.  The majority will allow the behavior to see how individuals cope and whether or not their reactions merit any kind of respect.  In this sense, bullying is a function of group dynamics.

That’s the most value-free way I can describe it.  While the majority doesn’t actively encourage bullying, it does nothing to actively discourage it within the boundaries of a self-defined group.  If the behavior itself were utterly unacceptable, it could be quashed by numbers.  No bully is going to stand up five, six, or ten others banding together to end his (or her) behavior.  How can I say this?  Because bullies who cross from one group into another often are met with precisely this group response.

I’ve seen this.

Now, here’s the part where I have to be careful not get weepy about water long gone under several bridges.

I was at the bottom of the hierarchy almost from the day I entered school until I went to high school.  Eight years of being bullied—consistently, spontaneously, at one time or another by just about every member of my class.  Why?  Because they could.

Here is what the psychoanalysis seems always to miss, what perhaps we don’t want to acknowledge about Our Children.  Bullying is in its most common forms a power issue.  It’s kids flexing their muscles, lording it over others, testing boundaries, asserting dominance.  It doesn’t always appear to be bullying, because often it doesn’t take physical form, at least not the form of punching and kicking.  Often it can just be labeling and subsequent ostracization.  But the pay-off is in terms of power.  The bully gets off on it.  It is fun for them.  They are not doing this out of some hidden self-loathing—they like watching the victim cringe or cry, they like hearing the laughter of others who are watching, and they like the momentary mantle of superiority knocking someone down confers.

The good news is, this is a phase that most grow out of.  The bad news is, because we don’t want to recognize the potential for any one of our kids to indulge this behavior, it doesn’t get dealt with except on the extreme level of pathological bullies, budding sociopaths who do have other issues.

I was passed from one bully to another for eight years.  There were a couple who were consistent in their treatment of me, but in truth most of my classmates took a turn at teasing, taunting, and torturing that Tiedemann Kid who cried at the merest slap and couldn’t fight back.  Most of them only engaged in the mistreatment for a semester or even one entire school year, then it got old and they quit—but they never apologized and they never acknowledged they were wrong and they never did anything to stop it when someone else started in.

I was a perpetual outsider all through school.  In high school I stayed aloof and developed an early reputation of someone who punched back, so it simply never started, but I was rarely part of the major groups.  In grade school, however, it was eight years of misery, knowing each day I was likely to be someone’s punching bag or the brunt of a joke everyone was in on.  I could catalogue the abuses, but I won’t.  Suffice it to say that none of my peers saw me as anything other than weird and because I was physically unable at the time to defend myself effectively I was the class target.  They enjoyed it.

This is the salient fact of bullying that requires acknowledgment, because it plays into so much else that is simply accepted behavior in our society.    Let me give you one rather extreme example.

President Obama recently award the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Salvadore Giunta, who risked his life to save others.  He is, in fact, the first survivor of the action for which he is receiving the medal in recent history—most MOH winners are deceased at the time of the award.  Brian Fischer, who is “director of issue analysis” for the American Family Association, has publicly condemned the award, claiming “We have feminized the Medal of Honor.”

“So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?”

The only way in which this makes sense to me, coming from a so-called Christian, is in the context of the school yard, where hierarchy is everything and status is based on the willingness to hurt and inflict damage in order to keep the identity of the group consistent and outsiders consistently out.  Mr. Fischer, whatever else he may be, is a bully, and those who agree with his sentiments are the rest of the class passively approving his behavior because no one wants to be associated with the wimp.

Perhaps a stretch, but until we acknowledge that we reward and even expect such behavior even in our children—adults who tell their crying, hurt kids to “shrug it off” or “man up” and exhibit loss of respect for any child who can’t hold his or her own against arbitrary cruelty—we have little chance at dealing effectively with bullying and will have to live with “adult” manifestations of that mindset.  While there may well be some Darwinian advantage in the test of mettle involved, within the context of a society of laws it becomes a pressure cooker in which broken spirits and twisted psyches stew, waiting for a trigger that will unleash unexpected and unwanted reactions.

So while I appreciate the attempt at the public level to rationalize the phenomenon of bullying,  I believe such depictions are beside the point.  The self-loathing-as-motive has traction with certain people, there is much to be said for it, but it side-steps the broader problem, which is that bullying is a normal part of the group dynamic through which we all move.  And understanding goes only so far.

It is an unfortunate fact that bullying is most often stopped, at least on the individual level, with violence.  The day I finally belted a bully and knocked him to the floor was the day it all stopped.  All of it.  It was dramatic.  It was as if I had finally proven myself.  No one picked on me after that.

Want to talk about self-loathing?