Spent a Thursday evening just after eating dinner many weeks ago poring though the latest Entertainment Weekly, which comes in the mail on Thursdays these days. Hadn't sat on my bed and just read through an EW in a long time. Sometimes I take it into the bathroom with me, but usually I go to the charticle at the end of the issue, "The Bullseye," then leaf through it, then toss it aside and promise myself to look through it at a later date. But hey, it was summer, and there was nothing on free TV on a Thursday that compelled me to watch, so I spent a long time going through the whole mag.
Unfortunately, an advertisement, something I usually totally ignore without a problem, stopped me in my tracks. I usually get swept away on a plane of bliss and Hollywood ego, but this was a crash back to reality. It had only (one phrase): "Everybody hates you." It is part of the StopBullying.Gov campaign.
I was bullied in junior high and high school. I can say, without a doubt, that it has affected my life forever. But I didn't hear the phrase, "Everybody hates you." I said this. It was to a girl in a Knowledge Bowl competition from another high school whose mom was my teacher in my high school, in a class which many of us thought she taught poorly. I remember, vividly, me and my friends on our Know Bowl team talking about her and her mom when I came up and put my arm around this girl and said, "We all hate your mom."
I heard in a Knowledge Bowl later in the school year, one in which I couldn't go, she blurted to my schoolmates what I said to her, only I think she said it like that comment hurt her.
I was trying to be truthful in a joking way. What I really did was bully her. I regret ever saying that. And I will never live that down, nor should I.
Seems that efforts to stop bullying have exploded in the past few years. I'm totally in favor of that. The sort-of new phenomenon of cyberbullying has driven some teenagers into suicide. Man, if I grew up in times like these, I could very well have been one of them.
That's why I fully support arrests of these cyberbullies. Tuesday authorities in Florida arrested a 14- and a 12-year-old girl for taunting a 12-year-old girl into jumping off a tower. Legal experts say that there's little chance these two bitches will ever serve time. Fuck that. They know what they did. Charge them as adults, and I want those two cunts to rot behind bars for what they did to that little girl.
I should be more active in anti-bullying efforts. But beyond laziness, something troubling is holding me back: My hypocrisy. Don't doubt this: I was bullied way more times than I bullied. But I have to admit that I dished out some not-so-nice teasing from time to time. And more than either, I watched a lot of bullying. All these anti-bullying campaigns tell kids to speak up when you see someone get bullied. What did I do when I saw someone get bullied? Nothing, I'm afraid to confess. So how can I implore other people to act when all I did was stand by and watch?
Maybe that realization is just a cop-out not to do the right thing now. But if I ever blind myself into thinking I was 100% bullied and become public in fighting like hell to combat it, I know there will be someone in high school or junior high or elementary school who'll come up to me and say, "No! You bullied me! You made my life a living fucking hell!" And then I wouldn't be able to help but feel that the emperor has no clothes.
Again, I don't think I was an asshole. Leave that to the jocks and losers in my high school. But although only the meanest among us would deny that bullying is bad, deep down I think we all know of a time where we were not nice to a person because we wanted to be assholes. And it is he or she who is without sin that may cast the first stone.
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