The other day I was reading a thoughtful, beautiful essay on some website. All was well until I got to the "comments" section. (Note to self: bad idea.) What had been a great experience turned into a giant pulsing glob of sadness, thanks to a parade of incredibly cruel people who take advantage of the Internet's consequence-free environment. Either the site doesn't have moderators or they're afraid of being accused of "censorship" (yeah, having been a moderator I love when people scream "censorship" when a privately-owned forum tells them to knock it off), so they willingly throw the Terms of Service out the window. Not only did they let the bullies overrun the thing, but they also drove away the more thoughtful people who might have contributed things worth reading.
I was reminded that life is an awful lot like high school. Oh, you think you've graduated, but the social patterns you see in high school remain through life: the popular kids, the cliques, the jerks, the bullies, the entourages, the catty remarks, the arcane rules sent down from Olympus by out-of-touch people who don't have direct knowledge of the realities you face...you name it. Like high school, life is all of this, layered like a big, sad pan of lasagna. Life isn't that far removed from the book, or the movie of the book. And it makes me very sad, especially since the stakes are much higher than in high school.
Now, some of you have heard me riff about being a "disappointed optimist." I'm that way because of how I was raised, in a grand tradition of doing no harm to others, respecting them, extending decency and courtesy, and generally giving the same treatment you'd want for yourself. My whole life has been about doing my part to hold up my share of the social contract. There's long been this expectation that the rest of the world would operate that way. Ha ha! The response to the "social contract" is often a snort and something like "I didn't sign no contract."
You'd think I'd have picked up on the truth back in grade school. I can never get overly nostalgic about my childhood because I was an easy target -- overweight, nerdy, talked with a really thick drawl early on -- and I remember the jokes and the nasty things said about me, or little incidents like the time we were walking to an assembly one school over and some of the "cool" kids tried to push me off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic, or several other episodes too picayune or horrifying to write about here.
Worse, when I'd try to defend myself or seek help, the majority of the people at school who should have been my advocates were completely useless; instead, they were more interested in false equivalency. I was as responsible for my own torment as the person tormenting me, I would be told...when the truth was, I hadn't done a damned thing aside from having the misfortune of being an easy target, and they wouldn't do anything to solve the problem. Like the absent moderators on that website, they just wanted the issue out of their hair.
I'll let you imagine how much fear this put into my tormentors...and what it did to me. I still remember the exasperated tongue-lashing I got from my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, all because the classroom bully kept picking on me, but she was more interested in supervising a club meeting that was going on at the same time. How dare I actually try to get her help when I was being picked on, right? Things changed mildly after my mother gave the teacher a piece of her mind, but I've never forgotten the sting of being blamed for the torment dealt to me by someone else. The damage had been done.
There's always a gift that comes through struggle, and out of those years of torment came an intolerance for bullies of any form. The credo of the newspaper PM -- "We are against people who push other people around" -- sums this up well. In my case, I earned it the hard way through any number of life experiences that pushed me to my limits but redoubled my resolve, and odds that seemed awful long but ended up in my favor thanks to hard work and more than a little faith in myself and in Someone up above.
But something else I've taken away has been insight. I've come to understand just how much of being a bully is about bluster, and how often it's a front for a deep insecurity and pathos. Be it the schoolyard bully or be it a jerk who's not happy unless he's spewing hate through a keyboard, you won't find much introspection. Something's missing. They make up for it by making others miserable. Some do it by being the bully. Others become disciples of a bully. On the playground it's becoming a lackey for the popular tough kid, and in adult life it's becoming a disciple of a pop-culture bully, parroting that bully's schtick without stopping to think through it (if they did, the cognitive dissonance would probably make their heads explode). And, often, what they criticize you for is actually what troubles them, but fear or obliviousness prevents them from confronting that reality.
What's also telling is what happens when you confront a bully. Now, I'm a lover, not a fighter...but I have a mean streak, and if backed into a corner I'm in it to end it. And I've found when you vanquish a bully, you find there's nothing behind the bluster. Outflank them, outfox them, knock them off their talking points or mess up the thought loop in their brains and they're the most thin-skinned, delicate creatures you've ever seen, so ready to cloak themselves in the victimhood they despise when others display it. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic.
When I was younger it was easy to feel intimidated. The people who made my life miserable, I thought, had the power: they could beat me up, say the snarky things, lord over me, whatever. I assumed they knew something I didn't, that when the smarts were doled out I must have been elsewhere. But over time, I came to realize just how empty those bullies were. You realize one day they're just winging a lot of it, and how much of their schtick has an undertone of desperation ("Oh, crap! Say something that sounds smart and get us out of this!"). I realize how much of the world is hot gas and bluster. And, sure, I fall victim to it myself sometimes. I'm human. On the other hand, knowing how it all works does help me navigate life a lot better than before.
But knowing this only goes so far. It does help make sense of the madness, but it doesn't stop it, and sometimes you feel you have your fingers in the holes but the whole damned dike is crumbling around you. And, sometimes, stuff like the comments on that essay make me wonder what the hell the world's coming to.
