Fight

Many years ago, well before the advent of Bully Free Zones, a classmate kicked me in the face.

More accurately, he lifted me up off the ground, turned me upside down, and tried to pummel my head into the playground gravel.  He attempted a wrestling move known as a pile-driver.  It is banned now, but, unfortunately for me, was very much in vogue on late 1980s elementary school playgrounds.  Because we hadn’t rehearsed like they did on the WWF, the move was less than well-executed.  My face clumsily scraped against his knee and then his foot before reaching the ground, kind of making it a kick.

 Kicking, pile driving, though, it’s all semantics, because the result was basically the same.  I earned a terrific-looking face scrape, one that seemed intense enough to merit some advice from my sixth grade teacher:  “You can’t let him get away with that.”

And so I didn’t.  Out on the same playground a few days later, I sucker-punched my assailant in the face.  When he tried to counter-attack, my friends joined, bumping into him, knocking him off balance, allowing me to throw in a few more uninspiring pelts against his head.

It was ugly, unheroic, and fairly effective.  He cussed at me some more, but he never touched me again.  We both ventured toward different recess pursuits.

My wound healed.

Last week, some kid on the bus grabbed my daughter’s book bag.  She is in Kindergarten and thus reacted to the event in much the same way one might expect: she cried.  The impromptu thief gave it back fairly quickly, but clearly the episode shook her up.  When I asked her what was wrong, she told me, between sobs, what had happened.

Now, the gut instinct, the parental impulse, was to chase down the bus, find the culprit, and throw his book bag out the window.  Fortunately for my career and self-respect, I remained seated.

I remained seated and instead held my little girl who, up to that afternoon, did not know she lived in a world where big kids sometimes take things from little kids for no good reason.  I held my little girl who is growing up much too quickly, and after a while I gave her some advice.

“If he takes it again, don’t cry.  Stand up and shout.  Tell him very loud to give it back.  Yell until someone hears you.”

She is six and wears a great deal of pink, and thus such a scene may incite more laughter than actual trembling, but at least a point will be made.

Will it work?  Who knows?  School buses are full of mean kids.  Life, too, but of all the strategies to deal with such people, it seems that crying about it is just about the least useful.

Before continuing, it makes sense to return briefly to my sixth grade fisticuffs, if only for clarification.  I am not a tough guy.  That weak, lopsided little boxing match out on the playground did not turn me into some aggressive, action-hero type eager to run and jump my way through the world.  In fact, I haven’t thrown a real punch since that day, and I try to avoid confrontation as much as I can. 

Thus, the lesson my sixth-grade teacher taught me was not that “violence can solve your problems.”

His lesson was much more profound and much more useful.

“You solve your problems.”

Looking back, it occurs to me that as the recess monitor, he could have stepped in.  He could have kept a close watch on us.  He could have set up a meeting between the bully and the bullied and perhaps even the bystanders, and all of our parents in between. 

But instead he just shook his head and told me, “You can’t let him get away with that.”

In other words, “solve your problem, even if it means sucker punching it and getting your buddies to help out.”

He did not give me this advice because he thought vengeance ought to be mine.  He told me this because, as an adult with some decades on him, he knew I had a problem to solve and ignoring it would likely make it worse.

We spend a lot of time and energy trying to stop bullying, and that is a good thing.  Bullying is bad.  Bullies are jerks, and, due to the advent of social media, they can also be jerks twenty-four hours a day.  There are students in my class who come to school miserable and leave even more so, often because of bullies who are practiced enough not to get caught.

Unfortunately, bullies aren’t going away.  Some people are just mean.  Putting up signs that say “Bully Free Zone” won’t actually put an end to bad behavior, just as our various “wars” on drugs, poverty, or terror have met with less than stellar results, as well.  Part of problem-solving should also be problem-dealing.  For example, you can’t “solve” bad weather, but you can “deal” with it by wearing boots. 

Thus, it’s unrealistic to expect my daughter’s bus, or her school, or her life, to be a bully free zone.   Because of that, it would also be unrealistic of me—and short sighted—not to give her strategies to “deal” with the people in her life who will try to take her stuff.

Maybe not everyone will have to suffer the bad end of a pile driver, but we all get our faces scraped one way or another.