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cluegirl has been talking about bullying, and the need for speaking the controversy.
Bullying is a system of subtly interlocking actions and beliefs that people have about the world which influence their perceptions about power and control. Bullies all have parents who use pain or the threat of force to control them. Always. Spanking and physical/emotional intimidation mean power to them from the time that they're toddlers, and that makes pain the natural way for them to seek control in later situations. They don't turn to bribery and social maneuvering the way normal children do, so they don't develop those skills 'til much later. As humans, we identify with our tools, even the emotional ones. Making deals with someone means that we are the kind of person who makes deals, we own that and identify with that sense of agency and the problem-solving that it implies. Hitting someone makes us someone who hits, and we identify with violence. If our development has arrested at that earlier point, before social bargaining, we do not develop the tools that others identify with until much later, so we spend our formative years identifying with using force to get what we want.
As we develop moral reasoning, we develop justifications for the things that we do. I never had the will to power, so I had no reason to build up the layers of moral justification and the necessary ethos to carry on hurting people once I had other ways to do things. Others were not lucky enough to be my kind of broken. I only had ethical problems with fighting once I got scared of myself and what I might do, and that wasn't until junior high. Before then fighting had no moral component for me. It had nothing to do with being mean, and in fact sometimes those were mutually exclusive. People who wanted to beat me up were sometimes not actually mean to me and vice versa. And some of the meanest bullies never tried to hit me at all. The worst of them just belittled me for being white trash, a clumsy loser, and a freak.
(Dominica McCarthy: I remember you. I have no more shame to paralyze me, and I'm no longer afraid of harsh words. Dread my return.)
Starting when I was 4, I used to pick fights with bullies. Bad guys getting away with shit messed with my world view, so I would start trouble with those I considered responsible. In retrospect, I didn't do it in any way that was actually going to resolve the situation, but I'm glad I picked those fights. Somebody needed to. My ability to be silent in the face of something being wrong has always been compromised, and maybe that's what the impulse toward justice is, I don't know. But fighting for justice when you're tiny is not unlike being a lightning rod. I was struck several times, and it seems like I was always grounded, but I kept the worst of the storm away from the people who needed the protection. They got protection, I got someone to sit with at lunch. It was a good system.
(Cody Neely, Simeon, David Humes: I miss you still.)
When I was little I didn't have moral heroes. There were no "good guys". I was not capable of assigning reasons to people's actions, and I knew my own darkness too well even as a child to assume that other people weren't just as potentially mean as I was. I just assumed that all people were like that, and that the ones who acted nicer just saw through the game we play with our natures and refused to play. I was ... kind of right? But not for reasons I was capable of understanding at the time.
When Larry died and everything fell apart, we moved away from the bullies I had grown up with. The new sets of bullies had no history with me, and so I broke out of some of the negative patterns that I had fallen into of assuming powerlessness. But escalating altercations until they became physical so that I could win them was, also in retrospect, probably a bad plan.
I think my threats of violence combined with my reputation for rage probably convinced a lot of authority figures that I was a bully, which is both funny and heartbreaking. I guess I kind of was? Being violent and traumatized, I fell into some of the same traps that bullies did - trauma is trauma - but while I felt hounded and persecuted, I wasn't afraid of these new bullies. I was desperate to get them to admit that they were wrong, that they were screwed up, desperate to get them to stop doing things that weren't right. I tried making deals with people like, "You leave Cody alone and I'll leave you alone." That didn't go over so well, except for how it got them to leave him alone to focus on me. And I was okay with that, but I did get a lot more retaliation and got into trouble twice as often. I could not have explained that I was trying to make things better or defend other kids. When I tried to verbalize it always came out wrong, and from the perspective of those authority figures they had already convicted me as soon as it was my word against one of the popular horrible kids. When you have a kid who's always in trouble and a kid who's never in trouble and each says the other is lying, who do you believe?
That's my perception of the bullying that had happened to me. What I think should be done about it is going to be a whole other post.
cluegirl has been talking about bullying, and the need for speaking the controversy. Bullying is a system of subtly interlocking actions and beliefs that people have about the world which influence their perceptions about power and control. Bullies all have parents who use pain or the threat of force to control them. Always. Spanking and physical/emotional intimidation mean power to them from the time that they're toddlers, and that makes pain the natural way for them to seek control in later situations. They don't turn to bribery and social maneuvering the way normal children do, so they don't develop those skills 'til much later. As humans, we identify with our tools, even the emotional ones. Making deals with someone means that we are the kind of person who makes deals, we own that and identify with that sense of agency and the problem-solving that it implies. Hitting someone makes us someone who hits, and we identify with violence. If our development has arrested at that earlier point, before social bargaining, we do not develop the tools that others identify with until much later, so we spend our formative years identifying with using force to get what we want.
As we develop moral reasoning, we develop justifications for the things that we do. I never had the will to power, so I had no reason to build up the layers of moral justification and the necessary ethos to carry on hurting people once I had other ways to do things. Others were not lucky enough to be my kind of broken. I only had ethical problems with fighting once I got scared of myself and what I might do, and that wasn't until junior high. Before then fighting had no moral component for me. It had nothing to do with being mean, and in fact sometimes those were mutually exclusive. People who wanted to beat me up were sometimes not actually mean to me and vice versa. And some of the meanest bullies never tried to hit me at all. The worst of them just belittled me for being white trash, a clumsy loser, and a freak.
(Dominica McCarthy: I remember you. I have no more shame to paralyze me, and I'm no longer afraid of harsh words. Dread my return.)
Starting when I was 4, I used to pick fights with bullies. Bad guys getting away with shit messed with my world view, so I would start trouble with those I considered responsible. In retrospect, I didn't do it in any way that was actually going to resolve the situation, but I'm glad I picked those fights. Somebody needed to. My ability to be silent in the face of something being wrong has always been compromised, and maybe that's what the impulse toward justice is, I don't know. But fighting for justice when you're tiny is not unlike being a lightning rod. I was struck several times, and it seems like I was always grounded, but I kept the worst of the storm away from the people who needed the protection. They got protection, I got someone to sit with at lunch. It was a good system.
(Cody Neely, Simeon, David Humes: I miss you still.)
When I was little I didn't have moral heroes. There were no "good guys". I was not capable of assigning reasons to people's actions, and I knew my own darkness too well even as a child to assume that other people weren't just as potentially mean as I was. I just assumed that all people were like that, and that the ones who acted nicer just saw through the game we play with our natures and refused to play. I was ... kind of right? But not for reasons I was capable of understanding at the time.
When Larry died and everything fell apart, we moved away from the bullies I had grown up with. The new sets of bullies had no history with me, and so I broke out of some of the negative patterns that I had fallen into of assuming powerlessness. But escalating altercations until they became physical so that I could win them was, also in retrospect, probably a bad plan.
I think my threats of violence combined with my reputation for rage probably convinced a lot of authority figures that I was a bully, which is both funny and heartbreaking. I guess I kind of was? Being violent and traumatized, I fell into some of the same traps that bullies did - trauma is trauma - but while I felt hounded and persecuted, I wasn't afraid of these new bullies. I was desperate to get them to admit that they were wrong, that they were screwed up, desperate to get them to stop doing things that weren't right. I tried making deals with people like, "You leave Cody alone and I'll leave you alone." That didn't go over so well, except for how it got them to leave him alone to focus on me. And I was okay with that, but I did get a lot more retaliation and got into trouble twice as often. I could not have explained that I was trying to make things better or defend other kids. When I tried to verbalize it always came out wrong, and from the perspective of those authority figures they had already convicted me as soon as it was my word against one of the popular horrible kids. When you have a kid who's always in trouble and a kid who's never in trouble and each says the other is lying, who do you believe?
That's my perception of the bullying that had happened to me. What I think should be done about it is going to be a whole other post.