Hello again. I just signed a contract with Creativia, my publisher, for my fifth book, this one entitled Bully-Be-Gone. “Why not?” thought I, “share a few of my thoughts on this issue. This terrible issue called bullying.
First off. Honesty. I was a victim of severe and repetitive bullying throughout my childhood and even into young adulthood. I haven’t shared that fact with anybody. Nobody! However, since Chapter 6 in my book chronicles my tale in detail, soon anyone who picks up a copy will know. The fact that I am 76 and am just now sharing that truth should tell you – if you don’t already know -the bottomless damage bully can do to a child. My bullying covered every level available, and I speculate that it uncovered and entered areas beforehand unknown.
Maybe someday I will write a novel-length true story about Eugene Fassbinder and me. Eugene was a beautiful person. An artist. All I am going to write here is that Eugene – or, as I called him, Gene-the-Machine (in school, he was Gene-the-Fag, Gene the Freak), shot himself to death after running a half-mile on a freezing night and waiting at the end of his lane for a girl he had a crush on, a girl who never intended to pick him up as she promised, and seeing pictures of himself the next week of him waiting in the cold, blowing into his hands and one of him crying.
This is not what I had intended to write when I began this post. But, you see, this is what happens, even though centuries have gone by since the last anyone had the temerity to bully me. Still, it remains, as if it happened yesterday. Maybe since I was strapped to a huge cement cross on Easter and left all alone. Since I was tackled and stripped of my shorts after I had sunk a 25-footer during basketball practice, in front of scores of student onlookers, and forced to walk across the gym only in a jock strap. Since I was pulled over the back of my seat on the school bus – that fu**ing hell-on-wheels – by the hair by a much bigger kid and beat mercilessly by a gang of students once I landed. Or maybe it was when I was tackled by half the boys in my gym class, thrown to the hardwood floor and beaten and – once again – stripped of my clothing and then laughed at for reasons to humiliating to go into here. Often, it is a matter of which one of these unspeakable assaults will wake me up tonight and not allow me to again find sleep. Sixty-some ludicrous years later….
Still, I remember. I also remember that almost every mind-numbing attack occurred in the presence and/or the knowledge of a teacher or responsible adult. None came forward, None as in no one.
Let me finish by saying what is obvious. Bullying may easily be the worst thing that happens to our children in school and in the community. It happens even in the home. Over the next few posts, then, I will go into this in more depth and talk about how parents, teachers, administrators, and fellow students can intervene on this.
Until then, stand up for yourself and
Never Give up.
The Hammer