Bullying

Bullying

It seems that everywhere you look in today’s society there is something about bullying and I think there should be. Maybe if this kind of awareness was around at the time of Columbine and the shootings in Thurston they wouldn’t have happened. Someone could have recognized the signs of the bullying that led to those tragedies and many others.

I can speak from the point of someone who was bullied. I know how those boys felt (I don’t condone what they did in the slightest) and I, on occasion, have wished that bad things would happen to my tormentors. I always wondered what I had done that was so wrong. Why were they picking on me?

There were a lot of kids that I’d been in school with since kindergarten and they seemed to be the meanest of all. Up until I about eight years old, I considered them my friends. Until I really understood what had been going on. When I would get off the bus and head into the house I would be crying because one of the girls had been mean or one of the boys had pulled my hair.

In the 5^th grade it was bad. I had just gotten a hair cut and it formed a halo of sorts and the older kids (some of the kids my age) would throw spit wads in my hair! I was called four eyes, fatso, lardo (being no more than maybe 80 pounds at the time), and many other things.

That’s when I learned to stay near the teachers. I knew that as long as I was around them the other kids wouldn’t be so cruel. This started the teacher’s pet thing. I was never a teacher’s pet; I just knew it was safe. In high school I even had a teacher tell me that unless they caught something being done they couldn’t stop it.

The children when I was in 7^th grade were the ones that humiliated me the most. They had complained to the office and my teachers that I had smelled bad. Not true. I showered every morning and used deodorant. Even when my grandmother told them, it didn’t stop them from forcing me to take a shower in the middle of the day in the gym teacher’s private shower. It was so humiliating. I’m sure there were rumors that I had peed my pants or shit myself and that’s why I had to change clothes and shower.

But as humiliating as that was it wasn’t until high school where I wanted it to end. In my cooking class sophomore year, also the year I nearly quite school, they would throw food stuffs at me from across the room. Dough, fruit, veggies; didn’t matter. If it could be thrown, it’d be thrown at me. There are probably still things up on the cupboards. I had the class with a couple of people that I’d been in school with for years. It was the boys in the class, the girls (for the most part) had seemed to mature a bit more that would throw things at me. It’s also when the rumor that I smelled once again resurfaced. At least this time I wasn’t forced to shower.

It was only a couple months into the second semester of sophomore year and I had gotten off the bus and ran into the house crying. I begged my grandparents to let me quit school and get my GED because I couldn’t take the bullying anymore. I can’t remember what happened on that particular day that caused me to ask, but it had to have been bad because I had always wanted to graduate from high school. I didn’t want to be a dropout like my parents.

To my surprise my grandmother said yes. She told me she didn’t want to see me in so much pain anymore. I went to school the next day determined. I walked to the counselors office and said I was going to quit and get my GED. She asked me to wait to decide. Then the principal called me into his office (one of two times I was there) and said that they didn’t want me to leave. They had a plan and then convinced me to stay. I’ll be grateful for that.

Things got better for a while then got worse. The kids that had bullied me had been suspended but came back and were worse. There were many times that I wanted to die because of how I was treated. I’d never done anything to anyone. I kept to myself and only talked to the few friends that I did have. Only talked to the people I had classes with when I had to for a project.

The bullies even got their girlfriends and boyfriends involved. I couldn’t see a way out except to die. This would have been the best solution, but I was and am too chicken shit to try that. I knew that going after the bullies would only make my last two years of school even worse.

I did my best to ignore them.

Junior year was a little better.

The last day of school, graduation, was bad. As with all graduations, we had to be in alphabetical order. So the person (I use the term loosely) who was supposed to walk next to be traded places with a girl so he wouldn’t have to be next to me. Now the girl I walked with was nice and apologized for the whole walk, but that didn’t negate the fact that he couldn’t put his fucking bullying attitude and hatred towards me away for three hours.

It was like one last insult before never having to see me again.

At the graduation party I kept to myself. Took some pictures of the few friends I had.

Even to this date I am still picked on by people.

Once I discovered MySpace I decided that I would try and give people the benefit of the doubt. I was hoping that now the many of my tormentors were adults that they had matured.

I tracked down so many of my former classmates including a few of the bullies. I was surprised by who added me and who didn’t. One in particular surprised me, sort of, not by the fact that had denied the request, but by how he responded when I asked him why. He had told me that I (in so many words) was a big fat nobody and that no one had liked me. I was shocked by this though I shouldn’t have been. I knew that I hadn’t been liked by some, but that everyone I’d been in school with had hated me was just wrong.

Since I’ve been on Facebook (I’ll be tagging them in this post) I have once again been looking for former classmates. Again I was surprised who added and who didn’t. The majority of them don’t seem to be very active on the site, but those that are barely acknowledge me and it goes both ways. I don’t really talk to them either.

That’s the end of the reminiscing.

The point I want to get across is that bullying is mean, spiteful, hurtful, and in some cases deadly. Thousands of chidren are bullied every year. Many of those children will turn into murderers, abusers, and pedophiles so that they are the person that does the hurting. The rest will kill themselves, more likely at a young age, because the pain of being bullied is too great.

I agree with those police, district attorneys, and others that have lobbied to have those children who do the bullying brought up on charges for murder.

Maybe if it keeps up it will stop the bullying.

Parents, if you were the person doing the bullying, stop and think before you say anything. Do you want your children to be like you? If you were the person being bullied, talk to your children. Let know you understand. Let them know you’re on their side. Don’t just chalk it up to kids being kids.

There is no crueler person in this world than a child. Remember that.