My own PTSD from public education certainly comes up far short as small children are being riddled with bullets at their desks, but fear is fear, and I recall an especially-traumatic chapter in my life when I, 15, a high school freshman, was terrorized by an upperclassman who, for months, made my existence a holy hell.
I had no one to tell. I came from a family that, while not especially “rough”, had a fearsome chip on their shoulder about being perceived by others as weak or, God forbid, a “sissy”. Where this mindset came from, I can only assume, was their own upbringing or peer osmosis. I can only laugh when I see television dramas in which parents counsel their taunted or vilified kid to “turn the other cheek” and “fighting never settles anything”. My parents expected, encouraged, a fight. You weren’t supposed to necessarily initiate one — but you should, if another boy called you an SOB, which implied your mother was a bitch, or cast aspersions on your family — but if one came looking for you, you’d better plant your feet and put up them thar dukes. They’d better cry. They’d better regret ever having come up against you. (The exception was a girl. You did not hit a girl, even if she kicked you in the balls. ) Compromise, bargaining, even apologizing for a slight you didn’t know you had even committed…those were revolting white flags of surrender, and I’d either be subjected to a practice boxing match with my sometimes-inebriated father or maybe grounded to my room for my cowardice.
So, if someone provoked you, this is what you did: you made a fist, you drew it back, you took aim and it landed where it landed. If you came home bloodied and bowed, well, by God, maybe next time you’d dodge better or become a better fighter. My parents didn’t want to raise no fairy.
Guess what? They already were.
This is no way to instill trust and safety and confidence in a child — to know that their own parents would not support them. It’s actually the antithesis of how you should raise kids. My parents were working class and we lived in a small, narrow-minded Midwestern town full of secrets and disappointment. This isn’t to shame or blame. There was no handbook, no Internet, no forums or chatrooms or support groups for two people, both still under 20, who had a baby boy named Rodney. They didn’t know better. And they would have been the first to defy the inertia of the police and rush into that Uvalde school, unarmed, without protection, to save any of their three children.
My hope is they would, now, but I somehow doubt it. I so admire the brave, sometimes-uncomfortable activism of teenagers today. I recall my own Dad pointedly telling me “Your voice is MINE until you are 18” when I wanted to write a Letter to the Editor to our local newspaper about censorship and was warned not to. My parents, scared of societal stigma, were not very big on taking a public stand nor its ramifications.
He — I’ll call him Bob — was from a family of boys of varying ages, most of them redheads, although he had jet-black hair. In old yearbook photographs, he always seems to have a third, chapped lip. The brothers were poor, shabbily-dressed and lived in a shingled something that looked it might collapse inward. Their mother always appeared exhausted and stooped and I think their father may have abandoned them. Life behind their front door was probably not so easy.
So maybe he wanted to make sure mine wasn’t either. Or maybe he just believed that my weakness was his strength.
Bob began to hit me in the arm every time we passed in a school hallway. Hard. I rarely saw him approaching. He would stealthily emerge from a cluster of chattering students going to and from the next class and punch my upper arm, then smirk at my shock and registered pain. I can still remember it: it was very similar to that self-satisifed smirk of Bruce Willis, pre-aphasia.
What I didn’t realize was that Bob also rode the same school bus I did every morning. Because of where he lived, he boarded before I, and was usually in the back. I think it occurred to both of us at about the same time that victim and victimizer were on the same vehicle for about 30 minutes. He would badger whoever was seated behind me to relocate and he would slap me. Sometimes he’d reach around and deliver the blow directly across the face, sometimes he’d squeeze the back of my neck, often in the presence of others who laughed or, fearful they’d be next, pretended they witnessed nothing. The bus driver had to have seen it.
I could not tell my parents. They would just encourage me to hit back and not only was it not in my nature, I was afraid of him and what a real thrashing would constitute.
I also knew better than to report the harrassment to school authorities. Any disciplinary action taken would be perfunctory and short-term and only accelerate the behavior.
I also knew that by going to a school official I would infuriate my parents. A true “man” did not meekly seek out others to fight or even mediate his battles.
So what are your options when the people who feed, clothe and house you won’t intervene?
My short-term remedy was the path of least resistance: I stopped taking the bus. I left the house early and walked a very long walk to school, usually alone. When colder and snowy weather made this impractical, I concocted another workaround; I caught a different bus on a different route several blocks away. Bob still magically found me in school hallways and the punishment now extended to grabs/pinches, twisting my skin clockwise until the hallway traffic pulled me away. The purplish welts took days to fade. More than once, he tripped me, and I fell to the hard terrazzo floor, humiliated.
I stopped going to the school bathrooms, waiting until P.E. or band (where they was a designated bathroom) to relieve myself. I would nervously scan the lunch cafeteria for signs of him; the last thing I needed was my tray of food upended for the entire student and staff body to witness.
The depression and anxiety I felt 24/7 crawls out from wherever it’s been hidden for 45 years as I type this. To not have a single advocate, absolutely no adult defense, is a hopeless feeling. I am not aware that it affected my grades, but I am sure it shattered my attention-span and academic productivity. When you are sure you’re going to be assaulted soon, you tend to back-burner reading assignments and homework.
Let me interject here that it never occurred to me shoot up my classmates; kidnap and torture Bob; torch the school to the ground; or otherwise avenge this wrong by injuring another. As much as, many mornings as I readied for school with my stomach churning, I didn’t want to exist, harming myself was also never an option. I would never leave a dark legacy of suicide for my parents to grapple with.
I was on the curb, after school, waiting for a bus when he approached. He crouched down and slapped me so hard my ear rang. It was loud enough that friends gasped as they backed away. He drew his hand back and slapped me again. I know my eyes filled with tears. Whose would not, if only in physical reaction? I continued to sit. He challenged me with disgust. “Ain’t you going to do anything?”
No, I wasn’t going to do anything. No one was going to do anything.
He ambled away with his own friends, who I am surprised in hindsight did not also hit, kick or spit on me, as my own shaken friends silently rejoined me and we worked very hard to ignore what just happened. I rode the bus home with new shame and a handprint on my face.
Then, one day, he stopped. He drew his arm back in the hall and I stiffened, readying myself for the hard thwack! to my arm, when he dropped it to his side, grinned and said, “I’ve just been kidding around!”
And so it ended abruptly. Had he found an easier mark? Did he intuit that he’d gone far enough, that repercussions of some sort were inevitable if he pushed much further? I sure wasn’t going to ask. My upper arm was grateful. I didn’t trust this pause but, as weeks passed and I found myself in his proximity, Bob had for his own reasons given up on harassing me.
He’s still alive. I found him on, of course, Facebook, where we all go to stalk old loves and determine if our colleagues are more successful than we are. We share mutual Friends, which made me queasy. He’s still in my hometown of Frankfort, Indiana, which comes as no surprise, since most of my classmates were ambitionless. He’s old and paunchy and hairless, with big yellow teeth. In a photo of a “fam” vacation at King’s Island, I see at least one grandson who bears enough of a resemblance to him that it made me shudder. From the tenor of his Posts, he’s clearly a Republican and probably, given that party’s inclination, still a bully. I was a little sorry he hadn’t died early on, I admit, of something slow-moving and painful, but it’s never that way for the most odious, is it?