More of the Story

Harrumpher's commentary seems to speak to moral solutions that treat the weakness of bullying victims. All very interesting, but I neither asked "why me" or, as far as I can tell, offered up a paean to self-pity. My question was why anyone?

Since it has come up, I'll offer my .02 that a huge part of misunderstanding the victims of bullying isn't understanding what it is (I think I did that elsewhere), it is exactly this idea that this sort of victimhood is self-inflicted. Might be, might not be. The problem I see is that sticking this label on victims of school violence  allows everyone else to preen their feathers of moral perfection without doing anything to share their virtues with others. "My virtues are my sword and buckler: Go thou and do likewise" isn't an answer: it's a cop-out. Worse, it's a direct contribution to the problem.

I have perhaps not made  a couple of things clear in my last post, and probably not to Mr. H. in conversation. My concern arises from the rest of the story. I did not spend my entire childhood in woebegone victimhood. Having created my niche in a new school in a rough town,  I was pretty much in control of my peer life in grade school, using most of the standards and skills Mr. H. associates with resisting bullying. They included standing firm, which in that town often meant throwing punches, and glibness. Conventional wisdom would say that having achieved certain pinnacles of moral perfection, I ought to have been well-placed to handle junior high school.
Alas, it was not so.

Seventh grade was an anomaly. I used the opportunities I had over the next two years to  get even, subtly and without overt violence. In my high school, where nothing like the toxic cliquism,  student bullying and staff enabling of the junior high was tolerated*, things grew even better. Once doors that had been shut to me were opened, I began to bloom. By my senior year I was well-liked, even popular. The gang that had been my seventh grade nemesis had evaporated and its members had faded into deserved insignificance.

I'm not interested in generating my own pity about the seventh grade anomaly,  or anyone else's. I'm asking why a student, until a certain moment coping well with school life, is suddenly called upon to put most of his or her energy into resisting, into standing firm if you will, instead of learning.  Why do the coping mechanisms that the world prizes suddenly fail some students and not others? Still more, is it really enough to moralise at the students who do not have any of the apparently necessary skills? Don't they also deserve a chance?

How is it that some students advance from the experience, while others commit suicide or homicide? The contemplation needs to get past the simplicity of "why me" as a social condemnation, to "why anyone, and why do these things manifest in such complicated ways?"

I'm also asking why some teachers and administrators will advance almost any excuse to relieve themselves of responsibility for allowing such situations to exist.

If we mean to understand the path to violent rampages and student suicide, I think it is desperately important to find these things out. I'm shouting here, not from self-pity, but because I understand, from the inside, how easy it can be for an adolescent to cross the line from suffering into violence. Some of us who endured this went to the line, but stepped back from the temptation to violence. Don't trivialise our experience, but let us help.




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* It was in high school that I got the first inkling of the low esteem in which my 7th grade "guidance counsellor" was held. I learnt as an adult that he was despised by his peers almost as much as was the junior high principal, but seniority shielded them both. It was a relief then to find out that I had not imagined the Principal's indifference or the hostility of that counsellor to any student who made him look stupid. Perhaps to the other conventional virtues we should add sophistication: a naive student appears to stand no chance.