Bully at the Pulpit
I’m a pretty big guy, so it was rare when I was younger that the prototypical “school bully” would decide to mess with me. There are, however, two instances that stand out in my memory of being bullied as a kid.
I ran into my first bully when I was in the second grade. Nathan, a student in another class, came up behind me in the bathroom as I was washing my hands. He pinned me to the ground and forced me to kiss the bathroom floor before scurrying away. I immediately went and told my teacher — a large, rather unpleasant woman with a wart on her nose like a witch (she was herself a bully in a lot of ways, although I didn’t realize that until later), who confronted Nathan and ordered him to apologize to me; he did so, begrudgingly.
I encountered my second bully in the fifth grade — a girl named Kayla. She was a hands-off type who preferred what might be called a Mean Girls approach: getting in subtle digs that were psychologically damaging, even if they didn’t leave physical marks. I’m not sure why she chose to target me, but she made fun of everything from my physical appearance, to my habits, to my name, which is Irish and not pronounced the way it’s spelled. What made Kayla’s bullying especially painful to endure was that I remember her being quite popular: she had lots of friends who, even if they didn’t participate in her sort of teasing, would laugh when she ridiculed me. It made me feel as though the whole class disliked me, and to this day, I sometimes have to convince myself — or ask to be convinced — that my friends aren’t just tolerating me or spending time with me out of pity.
In addition to doing what they could to prevent me from being bullied in an administrative capacity — parent-teacher conferences, meetings with the school guidance counselor, and the like — my parents would also try to comfort me by telling me about their own school bullies and how they never succeeded at their long-term dreams and aspirations. They would say things like, “Don’t worry about Nathan; with an attitude like that, he’ll never amount to anything.” I took comfort in that for a long time: the idea that there was some sort of karmic justice that rewarded a pleasant demeanor and punished those who got their kicks from being rude or nasty to others.
Fast forward a decade or two, however, and a classic, archetypal bully is about to be sworn in as 45th president of the United States. If that’s not amounting to something, I don’t know what is.
Here is a man who embodies many of the traits of Nathan, my first bully: he is known to have been a rambunctious and at times violent youth, beating others up to sate his aggression and once very nearly pushing another student out of a second-story window during a brawl, stopped only by the quick intervention of two of his classmates. He is also reluctant to apologize or admit to his mistakes, a recurring theme even beyond his childhood years.
He also, however, takes after Kayla, my second bully: he is known to have mocked the appearance of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffers from a joint disorder called arthrogryposis. He once made fun of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly for, of all things, menstruating — something that, I think it’s fair to say, is common to women as a sex — and then, as he has done with countless others who have dared to challenge him, sicced his more violent supporters on her via Twitter:
… Ms. Kelly said the general contours of Mr. Trump’s campaign against her — which she says included pressure on her bosses to rein her in and led to death threats from Trump supporters that forced her to take on a security contingent — were well known …
Mr. Trump’s support on Twitter in particular reminds me of Kayla: in the same way that it was disheartening for me to realize that, even though I thought of Kayla as being an unpleasant person, there were people who really, really liked her, it is now difficult for me to look at the legions of people re-tweeting Trump’s statuses and consistently defending even his most crude, ribald, and outlandish statements — this includes, I should note, people who mean a lot to me and for whom I have a lot of respect — and to know that, even though Donald Trump is unquestionably a bully, he is well-liked, wealthy, and, soon, president of the United States of America.
I’ve often heard it said that supporting Trump for president is sending a negative message to our children: specifically, that we are signaling to the youth of America that the path to the White House is still open to you even if you’re rude, crude, and bigoted. This, it seems to me, is destined to justify the actions of all the Nathans and Kaylas that are out there in the world, and possibly to create more of them. To those children who believe, as I once believed, that those sorts of people would inevitably face some sort of comeuppance later in life for behaving the way they do, I can no longer say, “You’re right.”
Instead, the best I can do is, “I’m sorry.”
