Friday, August 04, 2006

My Years in the Injustice Factory

A friend of mine who idealizes the past asked me if I’d like to go back in time—you know, for a second shot at celebrity or to relive my youth. My answer is, not very far. Not to high school, and certainly not to any moment before high school. If I had to choose between reliving middle school, for instance, and working the rest of my days clearing land mines, I’d say, just put me on the next plane to the Western Sahara.

School isn’t all bad, just like prison isn’t all bad. But if you want to know my earliest schoolyard memory, picture yourself sitting in a warm sandbox pushing a plastic truck through the dirt, maybe imagining yourself living the glorious life of a dump truck driver, when suddenly you feel your head being split open by, as it turns out, another five-year-old boy wielding a rusty lunchbox lid. Exactly why there was a rusty lunchbox lid in the kindergarten sandbox, I don’t know. That’s just the way school is. The weapons find their way in. My mother had to take me in for a tetanus shot. I never received any apology or explanation.

The event seemed anomalous. Little did I suspect what an injustice factory a school is. I hadn’t yet met the chunky, red-headed kid named Rusty who in second grade would catch me on the playground and sit on top of me for an hour and force me to say things like, “Rusty is great.” I don’t know what happened to Rusty, but in his absence, over the next eight years, I would receive numerous jabs to the shoulders and kicks to the shins, several knees to the groin, repeated pinches, hair-pullings, and twists of the arms, accompanied by an intermittent stream of insults, threats, and teasing.

Fortunately, I wasn’t especially ugly, weird, poor, or uncoordinated—only small. Other kids took far, far worse abuse. I mean nasty, Abu Ghraib-style treatment. In junior high, homosexuality was the special obsession of the boys, who practiced a general and also a specific form of what can only be called gay-bating, although the fact of the victim’s sexuality was beside the point. The general form applied to any boy and proceeded from the assumption that to be called “a queer” was the worst and most effective insult; and the specific form involved repeated public humiliations of the several boys in every class who seemed the most effeminate or geeky. No teacher or coach ever took any of us aside to talk about this homosexuality we were all so concerned about. I didn’t know at the time just how cruel girls were to other girls, but I’ve since heard many horrific stories from my friends, and just yesterday five girls in Kentucky sued their school system for neglecting to discipline female bullies who had made their high school years unbearable.

For many years I’ve managed to repress my most painful school memories; but my knowledge of the entire soul-bruising experience came rushing back when I saw two eleven-year-olds in my neighborhood following a scrawny classmate with taunts and kicks and thumps to the head. Their victim, straining to hold back his tears, tried to proceed with a grain of dignity.

My intervention provided him maybe a few minutes’ respite, but I’m afraid that the only sure escape route is the passage of years. I’m encouraged when I hear about school programs to combat bullying. Indiana state law provides protections that hold schools accountable. Read up on it, and talk to your kids.

When children grow up with the sense that they are helpless against the arbitrary violence of their peers, we run the risk of producing depressive, apathetic citizens, especially in a society where adults are already distant, preoccupied strangers. Children crave justice. They are, if anything, hypersensitive to injustices. That’s a good thing! We should nourish that sensitivity. When I look around me and see a nation of adults who fail to participate in democracy, who ask themselves what good it does to involve themselves in politics, which is increasingly the domain of bullies, I wonder if our general neglect of our children’s sense of justice isn’t at the heart of the problem.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on August 04, 2006
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