I’ve been reading a lot lately about bullying.
It’s made news that some people have gone as far as to kill themselves to escape being bullied. Some were being bullied over the Internet or on the school bus. Some attracted a bully because they were different or just too small and weak to defend themselves.
I’ve been a bully. I’ve stopped others from being bullied. Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. Jesus was bullied. Mosses was bullied. Gandhi was bullied.
When you look at it that way, if you’re being bullied right now; you’re in pretty good company.
Bullying doesn’t stop or start when you’re young and in school. It occurs in later life. I’ve been bullied at my job before. Usually by someone who outranked me. Right or wrong, I knew that standing up to them could cost me my job and, because I needed that job to feed my family; I let them get away with it.
See, none of us are ever exempt from being bullied. That doesn’t make bullying acceptable. It just might make it a little bit more understandable.
And in a broader sense, up and down the food chain, every animal in the kingdom has a designated bully. It’s why anteaters eat ants and lions look for a limp. They know that the slowest and youngest among us are the easiest to catch and devour.
I remember one time, back around the eighth grade, a guy moved to town that was a head taller than me and outweighed me by about 20 pounds. Since he wasn’t a half-Colvin like me and I didn’t even know his parents I had no one to appeal to on my behalf.
He loved to describe in lurid detail how my lifeless body would look right after he’d finished beating me up.
One day I had enough of his threats and I turned around and looked him square in the eye. I said something to the effect of: Okay, then do it. Let’s get it over with. You’re always saying you want to fight, so let’s fight. Right here, right now, let’s go.
I must have seemed to him like the little mouse that roared, because he looked startled. He muttered something under his breath about how he really wanted to be friends.
I didn’t let him off the hook. I screamed at him how I couldn’t be friends with someone who is always threatening to whip my (insert a four-legged braying animal here.)
Luckily for me; he backed down that day and we went on to become pretty good friends. Most people my size had never stood up to him like that before.
I believe that the imagination is much more powerful than anything reality can deliver. I made this bully think that I would be much more of a Scotch-Irish handful in a fight than he bargained for – that I would give as good as I got – that I was this lion’s prey without the limp.
Looking back now, I think the key to stopping the bully was the look I had in my eye. I really was tired and fed up with his threats and to such the extent that I would fight him every day until they stopped.
When I was little, Daddy used to tell me, “I don’t ever want to hear of you starting a fight, but I don’t ever want to hear of you walking away from one either.”
Daddy never gave me any advice on how to handle a bully. Like Jesus, Moses, and Gandhi; I sorta had to figure that on my own.
Randy lives in Minden. He can be reached at planorand@yahoo.com.