by Don Hall

Being the new kid at school every single year from grades 1 -8 meant I got bullied. A lot. Granted, I was already a bit of a smartass. Maybe I got that way as a defense mechanism. Maybe it just came naturally. Who can tell?

Funny thing is that I can remember most of the bullies from 3rd grade on.

Starsky and Hutch from Mrs. McWilliams third grade class. Based on their nickname you can guess what they looked like (unless you’re too young to have seen the show). In addition to constantly trying to get me in trouble and at least once a week lying to the teacher that I had said something off-color about her, they both took turns calling me names at recess. I was bigger than they were so it rarely got physical but given the fact that my family was poor and they seemed as wealthy as a pint-sized Bezos (probably not but everything looks huge when you’re eight years old) most of the taunts were about my clothes.

In fifth grade it was Anthony Jackson. He was a big black kid the size of an adult (again, youth and hyperbole go together like beer and peanuts) and he used to pound on me almost every day. I never understood why. Other kids would call him racial slurs and he left them alone. I never resorted to that sort of nonsense. I knew better. Mom was a good role model for that sort of thing. Whatever the reason, Anthony would go on a verbal tear, cutting me down until I’d snap. I was funnier than he was and could spin a dig like no one else. Then he’d beat the shit out of me and we’d start again the next day.

In seventh grade it was Victor Rodríguez and his gang of Latino boys. 

In eighth grade, I recall being set up by a few of the kids I’d end up going to high school with and LaDale Walters. By then, I was so used to being the new kid the words would just bounce off of me. I was crazy for LaDale. They knew it. She knew it. She invited me to her house and the four guys jumped me, kicked me, and dragged me across the gravel road with their bicycles.

Even then I understood that the words they used were nothing but sound. I was smarter than every bully I encountered and knew better insults. It was the pounding that hurt. It was the physical pummeling that left me bleeding and bruised. 

By the time I was in eighth grade, though, I had learned to fight back. That was how you stopped them. Hit ‘em back.

Of course, then I got in as much trouble as they did. I was no longer the victim because I hit back. 

I learned a lot of things being bullied consistently for seven years in a row.

I learned how to take a punch.

This seems like a life skill that shouldn’t have to be learned but it is the same lesson as when I was a kid learning to play baseball. I was put in center field because I have almost no athletic ability and possess no grace at all. But I was afraid to catch pop flies. I didn’t want them to hit me in the face like an ordinary human.

The coach came over, threw a ball at me. It hit me in the mouth hard. I cried. He said “That was rough, kid. Probably hurt. But you’re still standing, yeah? You’re OK, right?” I was. “Now you know what it feels like. It’s better to catch the ball than let it hit you in the face but if it does, you’ll survive.” I caught more balls after that.

Anthony Jackson taught me to not fear being punched in the face.

I learned how to take an insult.

When I hear people today cry out “Your beliefs are cancelling my existence” and “hate speech is violence” I can’t help but shrug. What I hear is people unable to handle ideas that are in conflict with their personal agenda.

The argument that words are the same as getting punched in the face could only be made by someone never once punched in the face. 

A sexist joke is only rape if you’ve never been raped. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in poor taste or is acceptable to hear but it’s hardly violence.

A racist epithet hurled at someone is substantially different and far more benign that being physically lynched and hung by a tree. Again, not cool but to categorize both the slur and the murder as anything close to the same is ridiculous.

“After all, people who obsess about being wronged are just plain unpleasant to be around: perpetually ungrateful, short-tempered, self-absorbed, never at peace, never at rest.”

Hmmm. That sounds like an apt description of 90% of Twitter. It sounds like an accurate breakdown of many on the side of the Woke as well as many on the side of the Alt Right. My guess is that it may sound like your significant other, your good friend, someone you work with.

It is, in fact, a description from an article in The Atlantic describing Donald Trump.

I speak from experience because I’ve certainly had my moments of being unable to take a verbal baseball in the chops with any kind of sense of proportion or humor. Sure, I’ve been obsessed with my own sort of vengeance and been angry and filled with spite over some barely educated online bully calling me names and semi-organizing the whole “call-out” and “cancel” culture game.

There is a psychological thing going on, though, that if we believe something is harmful, we are more likely to experience it as harmful. This interactivity between our definitions and our experiences reshape how we experience more of our day-to-day lives. It has been suggested that broadening one’s concept of trauma undermine’s resilience because our brains are all spongey. I think most would agree that being thickening up the skin is preferable to being in self imposed pain over someone misgendering you or asking where you’re from.

Another thing I learned from those bullies in grade school was this:

Anyone who sides with the bullies, either out of fear or agreement, isn’t worth your time.

Here is where my disdain for the mob bullying of everyone from J.K. Rowling (uncancellable) to some guy tricked into the “OK” hand symbol and then fired because the white nationalists decided that the “OK” symbol was now theirs separates from the common handwringing over this Twitter-centric phenomena. 

In 2010 I had a blog entitled “An Angry White Guy in Chicago.” I was a lot less rational and a lot of my online vitriol was focused on George W. Bush. I worked for a public radio station and, one day, after an early kerfluffle regarding reporters with social media accounts popped up, my boss asked me what I was going to do with my blog in the face of more stringent corporate control over online opinions.

“Wrong question.” I answered.

“What’s the right question?”

“What are you going to do about my blog? I’m going to keep writing and if you fire me for it, I wouldn’t want to work for you anyway.”

I don’t like bullies of all stripes. I don’t care much for weak ass histrionics trying to tailor society into what they want everyone to do or how to behave, either. Face masks? Required because we’re in a pandemic spinning out of control. Common good and all that. Controlling which ideas are acceptable? Not a chance. “This isn’t an abridgment of free speech. These are just the consequences of saying the wrong things.”Bullshit, kids. These are the consequences you’ve decided so that you can silence those ideas you don’t like.

You’ve forgotten that those who live by the wholesale cancellation of ideas they abhor, die by the fact that there are a lot more of everyone else getting sick to death of it. As one Vice editor was accidentally caught saying “Woke is fading in influence.”

The companies who kowtow to the demands of children and zealots are worse, though. They are not companies (or colleges, or theaters, or news organizations) worth being involved with.

Bullies, like any other obstacle in life, are there to teach you something. If all you learn from them is to behave exactly like them, you have learned the wrong lesson, bub. Lots of lessons to be learned from obstacles but let’s bully anyone who presents one instead of learning how to thicken up, laugh at yourself and them, and push through adversity or simply bad manners is definitely among the best to absorb.

The mob push for enforcing a moral purification designed to eradicate offense is simply idiocy and the need for a whole bunch of weaker bullies to band together to “cancel” people is pathetic. 

I mean, at least Anthony Jackson didn’t need a bunch of friends to pummel me.