Let’s stop calling every mean thing someone does to someone else bullying. There, I said it, first sentence out of the gate. They tell me that to make a good blog post you’re supposed to say something big in the first sentence and then clarify. So let’s do that.
Before we do, I feel like I should say that I’m a product of being born in December of 1979. Just in time to catch a little bit of President Carter before President Regan took over in 1980. So I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s. My particular age range got to know life before gadgets, and then was still able to embrace them when they started coming out. I had an AOL 1.0 install disk. I was six when the Challenger blew up, and was turning nine when the Berlin Wall fell. I got my first computer in 1994, which was apparently when Al Gore invented the internet. Bigger kids picked on me.
Gasp.
Listen, this isn’t one of those “only the strong survives” kind of things. I think we’re confusing being an a-hole with being a bully lately.
Back in the very early 90’s, before I got my super sweet 286 cpu (google it if you must, but I think if you google that kind of technology, it should take just as long to pull up as it did for me to start the thing.), I got picked on by a couple of kids. I used to think it was bullying. It wasn’t.
Part of my family moved back to Emporia, Kansas, where I was born in 1989 after my parents divorced. I went with mom and two of my siblings, while my dad moved with two of my other brothers to Kansas City. Sure, I was born in Emporia, but I hadn’t ever really lived there. I even told one f the kids in my fourth grade class I was from Maine for some unknown reason. That guy is probably still walking around thinking I’m from Maine.
We were not a family that was well off. We got food stamps. The four of us lived in a small two bedroom apartment that, roaches to residents, definitely belonged to the roaches. I remember a few kids in class made fun of me because I didn’t have any of the cool clothes. But they had a bowl cut, so I won out eventually, it just took a few decades to appreciate it.
Middle school came and I had a couple of guys that made it their mission to make me miserable. First was Clint Bowyer. You may know that name because now he’s famous for driving left in NASCAR.
The other one was a fellow poor kid who just didn’t want to be left behind. He was aggressive, but individually, he was a nice enough guy. Clint knew I was poor. All of his richer friends in our class knew I was poor. We only fought once. The fellow poor kid, Michael, stuck up for Clint. I got a couple punches to the gut and didn’t land anything myself. I wasn’t much of a fighter. Not much has changed in that arena. Clint made sure I knew he was richer than he was. All of his friends did. So he was a bully right?
NO! It turns out that, that guy you know who you hate at work, the one who is just plain unpleasant, was probably just a smaller version of that when he was a kid. Being mean, isn’t bullying. Bullying is when you are constantly, never relenting turning someone against their own self. It’s a lot like how I’ve been told prison is. You have no will of your own. It’s all brought down on you, it starts feeling like you have no choices. It’s a one sided psychological war that feels impossible to win. It’s why kids commit suicide. They eventually agree with their mental captors that they aren’t worth anything.
We have to understand that there is something to be gained from having differences as a kid. I was poor. I learned how much I could do on my own, money be damned. I hope that Clint, sometime while he’s turning left, realizes that he has impact on people’s life beyond a race track.
I don’t ask for us all to get along, I ask that we don’t go misusing a word that means something to kids who are in a living hell. Recognize what that is, let’s not resort to making that word just mean, well mean.
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Oh, and to the rest of my 6th grade class, Surprise! You CAN make a living being a dork!
