Hello Cruel World

I’m astride my bike near the big park.  G.D., the local bully/cool kid, calls out to me.  I turn and look and our eyes meet.  With cold inscrutable contempt he takes the rather hard “softball” he is holding and simply beans me in the face with it.  He watches my anguished pain, humiliation and shock the way an infant watches milk tossed off the highchair tray, studying his universe of cause and effect, of pleasure and pain.

Time stands still.  With a whooshing of surreal clarity everything telescopes back into sharp close-up focus.  G.D. is almost unbelievably handsome, charismatic with intermittently smiling eyes and a star aura.  He shouts at me to go get the ball—the ball rolling off down the street after it bounced off my face.

In a millisecond of calculation I picture retrieving the ball and having it thrown in my face again, the lesser toughs cackling like hyenas as my puddle of already liquefied self-esteem seeps into the nearest sewer.  Like a refugee running from armed soldiers I make a break for it, blur-pedaling my green Schwinn stingray fastback with equal parts rage and fear, laughter receding behind me.

Panting I race into my house, into the desolate air conditioning, the humming of the fridge, the cicadas screaming outside… outside where I am now afraid to tread.  For years I would dread even passing G.D. in the hallway, not realizing that I was but the faintest blip on his radar; never realizing that I was just one of the many weak meaningless kids in the throng, the entire pyramid of those lesser beings than himself.

I could not fathom that he was the youngest of eight or nine kids, mostly boys, or that his parents were reputed to be brutal and his brothers worse, beating him all along the way.  I could not possibly have the empathy to imagine that in my soft and trusting face he might have seen, and hated, a loved child—a perfect screen against which to hurl the softball of his mysterious wound.

I hated G.D. with all my heart, and yet found him fascinating and somewhat magnetic.  In a town where the barber called everyone, “Hey handsome,” I was neither gay enough nor mature enough to realize that G.D. actually was.  When I started to watch Friday Night Lights I realized that Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) was practically a ringer for the G.D. of my childhood.  How could a character like that have related to a nerdy sheltered kid with hardly any sense of bad boy or real abuse in him?  And yet the irony was that in my own secret self, I was much more a bad boy than G.D. could have imagined.  I even think he might have seen me as just one of the kids in the neighborhood; who knows he might even not have completely hated me.

I stayed clear through elementary and middle school, knowing which way to avoid walking, when to turn and take another street or skip the park.

My last interaction with G.D. was when, in high school, he and a particularly mean girl both spat water on my back from the drinking fountain when all I wanted to do was get invisibly on the bus and go home to hide in my room.

I was in my sophomore year of college at Michigan when I got a call from a friend at Princeton telling me that G.D. had died in a car accident.  G.D. hadn’t gone to college—apparently he’d become a drug dealer and a pimp (but who knew the legend from the truth); the story was that he was driving to Florida to do a drug deal when a car flew off an overpass above him and smashed down on him from above, killing him instantly.

I was a callow nineteen-year-old with a strange and sudden sense of pleasure.  Perhaps there was a god, a god that dropped cars on mean people?  Perhaps there was something to this karma thing?  After all, I now had friends, and a girlfriend and enthusiasm for film and books and music and I was alive and G.D. was dead.  I was happy. And I was not guilty about it.

But as the years passed; as I moved from film to psychology; as I worked with troubled kids, with various versions of G.D. by the caseload; as I learned the sad stories of abandonment and abuse that built up to violence and cruelty, I began to re-think G.D.  I began to regret feeling happy at his death.  His memory haunted me, his face, his eyes that looked more kind and beautiful and wounded as they faded into memory… as he became just a confused, angry, lovely eleven or twelve year old with a softball and a chip on his shoulder, not Dillinger, or Clyde Barrow, or a drug lord or a gangsta, or a thug… just a boy being mean to another boy, I found myself feeling strangely connected with him.

And slowly a warm spot in my heart grew and grew for G.D. and now not a day goes by that I don’t think of him; he’s sort of like a friend now, as much a wise figure as an eternal puer of a misunderstood bad boy now that he’s dead and not all messed up in the way we the living see things, somehow just a sweet boy to be mentored and appreciated, perhaps a Buddha from whom I can learn impermanence and equanimity.

So, this being Bully Awareness Month, perhaps we might think for ourselves about bullies and what they mean to us personally.  After all, most readers of this blog are likely to think that bullies are bad (i.e. other people’s kids) and that we must be aware about them in order to protect victims (i.e. our “good” kids).  Yes, there is truth that cruelty has consequences, including far too many suicides; however, we may be less likely to notice how our own attitudes could lead to bullying in our own kids.

I was no angel as a child, and there were times I was terribly cruel to other children (and I too was anxious, insecure, angry and confused in a world that seemed cruel and false to me).  I have noticed that a lot of bullying seems to come from some sort of anxiety—the need to give away unwanted feelings of rage, fear, inadequacy, shame, etc.—the wish to give them away like a softball to the face of someone, anyone, else.

How might the competitiveness of parents (who often assert, and even truly believe, that they are not being competitive as they push their children into countless activities, honors and AP classes, tutors, resume building and future strategizing) trickle down to kids who simply feel like they are not up to their parent’s standards?  Turning to the group for identity and approval, the group itself becomes a roiling game of hot potato where bad feelings end up piling upon the sensitive, the late blooming and the socially different kids.

Could it be that the group is cruel because we parents are, deep down, insecure and thus catty, cutting, devaluing, judgmental and cruel when stressed?  Could bully awareness really mean, or at least begin with, awareness of the bully within ourselves?  Could the kids we care for somehow mysteriously benefit if we were to recognize the bully in the mirror; the superior attitude, arrogance, condescension and the like that may be so subtle in “successful” people as to be almost completely unconscious (as we think of ourselves as generous, green, politically correct and the like).

I try to be nice, patient and compassionate—and certainly I try to present that aspect of myself in a parenting blog.  But I freely admit that I’m not that nice (and don’t expect myself to be); rather I think honesty about the range of our human experience might let us find more authentic connection, and ultimately more safety in the group—more understanding of difference, of strong feelings even when negative, of inclusion and a pro-social ethic in which it is cool to be kind, and where there is room for everyone in the group.

Awareness is very useful—it diminishes the press to “act out.”  Thus awareness of our wounds, our angers, our cruelties, our insecurities and the like may allow us to find more equanimity in our hearts and our behaviors.  Denial leads to trouble while true awareness leads organically toward compassion.  Tolerance for strong feelings allows us to truly hear, and emotionally hold, our children.  Shored up by all of us collective parents, even the at-risk kids might be better expressed and less compelled to cruelty.

If there is even the slightest correlation between grown-up anxiety and childhood bullying (be it victim or bully, it is equanimity and the integration of opposites that bring harmony within and without) then it might well be an act of love to deal with the bad feelings within ourselves.  And while there may be gold in the poop, bad feelings tend to roll downhill.  For this reason we must be like Sisyphus of the crap boulder, ever pushing the dread and inadequacy up hill, finding joy in the arduous process of human life, while protecting our children from our own wounds and insecurities (perhaps just by being more honest and less ambitious for, and through, our children—be it ambition for achievement, toughness, beauty, coolness or any other notion that isn’t in line with our children’s true Selves).

So, here’s to brave awareness of, and gallant grappling with, the bully within—our own Shadow selves—in the service of all our collective children.

Namaste, Bruce (and, perhaps even, G.D.)