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Back to the Forum Archives If you live in the United States, I am sure you have seen a pamphlet called Watchtower and another one called Awake. You really can't avoid them. They get shoved in your face on a regular basis. These very obnoxious Jehovah's Kingdom people come around and interrupt your day with them. They hammer on your door and shove these things at you. They don't care if you were having lunch, having sex, or in the middle of balancing your checkbook. The sickest part is this disgusting veneer of nicey nice they wear while they are boogering around in your life. In the last one of those pamphlets that was shoved at me, the headline and most of the content were about bullying. There has been a great deal of noise and rhetoric about bullying in the media of late. So, of course, these folks had to get on board. They devoted pretty much an entire pamphlet to it. The focus was on the bullying of kids by kids. Of course, they find the same causes of bullying that everyone else, including me, has found. Namely that bullies beget bullies. Like all other children's behavior, their role model can usually be found in the home. If papa bullies mama and gets what he wants, guess what? Junior will apply papa's tactics to his own situation. He will bully his peers to get what he wants. This is not a new thing. When I was in grade school, some 60 and more years ago, I was bullied. Many other children were bullied too. Some kids were affected for their entire lives. I'm sure one kid, I will call Paul, suffered this fate. I will get to that shortly. However, most of us dealt with it a bit better than that. This is not to say bullying is good. What is good is that most kids used to handle it. Adults never did. They do not handle it now and they did not handle it when I was a kid. In fact, the adult tactic has not changed. They pretend to not see it. It is definitely a pretense. It is impossible to not see it. I did get one bit of advice from an adult. My twin brother and I had been the victims of a local bully, call him Billy the bully, for several months. I was complaining bitterly about this to my father. In my heart I knew he would not intervene, but hope springs eternal. What he did was put his hand upon his hips and look sternly down at us. Then he said, "There's two a you an one a him." That's all he said. He turned and walked away. I could say nothing. His logic was unassailable. The very next day, on our way home, Billy showed up. He took hold of my shirt front and was threatening me with a huge raised fist. It was then my twin brother did something so amazingly courageous I still marvel at it. Understand that Billy stood a head taller and outweighed him by a great deal. In the five to fifteen age range, two years makes an enormous difference in a kids physical attributes. Billy, two years our senior, was like a giant to us. Still that skinny little brother of mine leapt upon Billy's back and wrapped an arm around his neck in a rather inept choke hold. It had little effect except to distract Billy's attention away from me. I was so surprised I almost lost the moment. Then I came to my senses and acted, using my fists on Billy's face and head. We all went down in a heap of flailing arms and legs, with accompanying B movie grunts and snarls along with Billy offering the appropriate lines, like, "Take that you rat!" and "Oh you would, would you?" The scrimmage did not last long and no one got hurt. Another kid had seen the action and came running over. Since my brother and I were not sure which side he would take we made a strategic withdrawal. Supper was waiting after all. So, we all went our ways. The interesting outcome of this scuffle is that the three of us became friends a short time later and remained so for many years. It turned out that Billy was only a bully as a pretense. He really wanted to be liked and respected. Being tough was one way of getting respect. A better way was to become a friend and it required much less energy. Once we gained his respect, he became our friend. Another case happened for me a few years before that in the earlier grades. We had a pretty tough kid in our class, call him Walter. I made the error of annoying him one day in school. He, as was his habit, offered to meet me in the playground after school for a fistfight. I declined the fisticuffs, knowing I would lose, and suggested we wrestle instead. He had no choice. He had made the challenge. It is a mark of Walter's reputation that I became something of a short term celebrity simply by agreeing to meet him on the field of honor. The meeting went as I had expected. My choice of wrestling keep me from getting beat up too bad. The fight ended quickly and we all went home for supper. Later, Walter and I became friends for a while. That lasted on and off throughout our schooling. Back to the pamphlet. Of course, the Jehovah people had to answer the rhetorical question, "Bullying, what can you do about it." This is where we diverge radically. One of the really stupid things these fools advise a kid to do is to walk away from the bully. These holy-rollers are not the only ones giving this stupid advice. I have seen media people do the same thing. That is typical of the things mindless adults with an agenda will do. They advise a kid to do something that no thinking adult would do. I am here to tell you, it is a fatal mistake to run from a bully. If you do, you will be meat from then on. You will become his property and your life will be miserable. I have seen it happen to a few kids. It is truly a life of hell. This is what happened to the aforementioned Paul. He would not fight. He ran if he could. As a result, he became a marked kid for all of the bullies in the school. They sought him out to make him their own personal punching bag. In my personal experience, very limited indeed, I have found the best action is to stand up to the bully, regardless of how terrified you are. In most cases, the bully will try to find an easier victim. If not, you may get beat up, but it will probably only happen once. That is better than becoming someone's routine victim. The rest of the Jehovah people's advice is the standard, bring God into your home and put your life in his hands. Well, I don't know about God. I do know that bullies beget bullies, so a good home environment will not produce bullies. A good home environment does not require some outside magical creature. It requires honesty and cooperation on the parts of all members of the home. This, of course, means the head of household must set the example. Like it or not, we are the role models for our kids. They may or may not follow our advice, but they will try to emulate our behavior. So, if your kids are misbehaving, look to your own behavior. This is not just about bullying. It's about all of our kid's behavior. If you don't like what your kid is doing, stop setting the example. Now, I want to make one other point before I leave this subject. Let's get clear about bullying. I said bullies beget bullies, but that starts at the very top. Like everything else in America, it starts in the White House and trickles down. It starts with the president, the Ashcrofts, and the Rumsfelds. We have a president who believes might makes right. That is the essence of being a bully. It's the use of power to gain your goals. We saw that when he ignored the UN and invaded Iraq. You see it every day in his administration. You see it in how our FBI and other agencies work. You see it in the Patriot act and in administrations attempts to intimidate our congress. You see it with how prisoners are treated. So here is the simple rule about kids becoming bullies. Don't allow bullying anywhere and especially in our educational system. Don't let the government bully administrators, don't let administrators bully teachers, and don't let teachers bully kids. If kids are treated with respect, they will learn to respect others. Bullying is not inherent, it is learned behavior. There is only one source of that learning. Children learn from adults. They don't necessarily learn what you tell them. They learn from your behavior, your example. It is really wrong to beat up on kids for being bullies without
dealing with the people who taught it to them. Adults always
fail to see the obvious when dealing with kids. They talk about
bullying and they talk about the kids and how to stop them from
doing it. We never look at the real issue of cause. We never
ask what caused that kid to become a bully. If we did, we would
find that the cause was us.
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