Sarx

In 1973-74, in a small school district in rural southern Georgia, my family lived in a house off a dirt road in an unincorporated town so small we had to go to several towns over to get the mail. Every day my brother, sister and I would ride a bus for quite a long time, to get to a huge, rural School that was located off another dirt road, between a cow pasture, a cotton field and a corn field. This made if very like my own house except for size and the corn field. I was a 4th grader, Jimmy a 3rd Grader, and Anita was in 1st. We were all in the same school - along with everything else up to 8th Grade. The High School students from the entire country went to the County Seat.

A couple of the stops after ours, where the road had turned again to paved, we were joined on the bus by the Fifth Grade Bully, George Showers. I can’t tell you the name of my teacher that year - for all that she took great care of me - but I can remember the name of George Showers.

Every day he would sit behind me and pick something to make fun of - my polyesther clothes, my underclass sneakers, the fact that I did my homework, the fact that I had a different accent, the fact that I had no father (my stepfather was, at that time, stationed in Thailand). The fact that I wore glasses. The fact that it took two single parent families living in our two bedroom house to pay for everything. Pick one: I was just too weird to put up with for the normal southern, white, middle class boy.

The bus driver would make him move eventually, although he was quite good at avoiding the driver’s eyes when he was doing something bad. Usually the first sign that something had gone wrong was the fact that I was crying. George Showers wasn’t anywhere near me in school. And for some reason I have no memories of being tormented on the way home at night - only every morning. Mom would call the Showers family, the school district, the bus garage, whatever, to no avail. Mom would decide all of us kids needed to sit together (which was really hard sometimes) or that we needed to sit separately. It didn’t matter: Jimmy and Anita were safe and it was only me that was the target.

Remember Lidsville? I had this lunch box… it looked just like this. I’m sure it was made from something like cast-iron and had a glass thermos - like all lunch boxes in the days before we were so concerned with “Safety”. It was also the target of much taunting.

Finally, one fine spring morning, George Showers launched into his usual fest of childhood brain-screwing. He demanded my lunch. He wanted to see what was in the lunch box… and, for some reason I snapped.

You want my lunch box? Here’s my lunch box! WHAM, upside his head. Once or twice. I leapt over the seat and landed in his lap and kept hitting him, the other kids were either screaming or laughing. George was crying. In his mirror, a picture I can easily recall at any time, the bus driver was cheering me on.

I went to class. I came home. I never went to the principal’s office. Nothing ever happened - except George never once sat anywhere near us ever again.

I’ve faced many bullies: a gay man growing up in the south will, and, for whatever reason most bullies figured that important difference out and took advantage of it. I was given a broken nose in my Freshman year and nearly scalped by a football team my Sophomore year. Until I reached my Junior and Senior years in Upstate NY, where gay was still odd, but just odd in another way… in fact, not until I was a senior did I feel 100% safe.

Ever after the George Showers incident, I can remember the feeling of anger: it goes right out of you like a canon fire aimed at your target. I’ve learned over the years to channel that anger, first in bad ways (in verbal arguments it can all be attached to one word that will come like a punch to your enemy’s solar plexus); and later, in better ways - political activism, spiritual warfare. My own weaknesses.

Mom says the reason I lived in NYC for 13 years safely, was because I always walked around like I knew where I was going. I think it was because I’ve always remembered what it’s like to hand someone my lunchbox.

In the days following the Columbine Shooting, the two shooters were reported to act weird and wear black trench coats and hate everyone: everyone being, in that town, upper/middle class white people, all going to seemingly the same Church, and all speaking the same doublespeak (”we’re Christians but today is ‘4/20′ day” - which has nothing to do with Hitler’s birthday and everything to do with pot); that same doublespeak that lets one be in the High School Christian Club in the morning and try to scalp a fellow club member in the afternoon. Overall, these Colorado folks reminded me of the smug jocks that used to beat me up after school because I was odd. They reminded me of the Southern Baptist deacon and Vice Principal that was clearly more supportive of the scalping football team than the longhaired weirdo sitting in front of him.

This was way before the reality of the situation was developed by investigators - way before we knew about the long-brewing anger at society that they tried to treat with Zoloft and other fun things. If you’re angry with society it must be your fault: not society’s.

In the years following Columbine we’ve seen an increased fear of “abnormal” kids: kids who don’t want to talk to people, kids who might be able to see through our veneer of normalcy to the chaos we all all hide. We are doing the same thing now, to Cho, the shooter in Virginia. We medicate our kids into some kind of mediocrity that is not supposed to let these sort of aberrations happen. Instead of spending more time with our kids, instead of loving them, parents want to be able to have our their selfish fun - have we not sacrificed enough? - and addict our wastrels to Straterra or Cymbalta or Fluxotine.

I’m so glad none of those drugs were invented in 1975.

Sometimes our system of cultural encoding doesn’t work. The answer is not to hammer a square peg into a round hole by letting bullies do the dirty work of weeding out the misfits. The answer is to expand society’s loving embrace to not exclude these folks. It’s easy to lovingly embrace the good people - by which we generally mean people like us. We need to be better with the odd folks. Whenever I hear “anti-scocial” behaviour, I hear “needs more love because this one is different.”

An Orthodox priest once wrote on a mailing list, “If a girl with a ring in her nose came to my church, I’d suggest some psychiatric help.” This is the same thing the professors and counsellors and fellow students were saying to Cho at Virginia Tech. He may have well been quite crazy but that doesn’t mean you can’t love him. Loving someone is not inviting them to be like everyone else: it’s meeting them where they are. And I’d always suggest more love. If we catch the Chos, the Harrises, the Klebolds early, tell them they *Don’t* have to be like everyone else, tell them they can be here, that they are loved… (and yes, that might involve some “tough love”, too) not only will we not have Columbines or Virginia Techs, but we’ll not have so many runaways in my addiction programme who can’t figure out why it’s okay to prescription-medicate to “normal” but not ok to self-medicate to fun.

I’ve never done it again… but I have done it once. I had only a Lidsville Lunchbox and not a gun. If I were to have to place blame: George Showers, his parents, the Bus Driver, the School District… none of these leapt in to defend the weak and powerless when they had multiple chances. I think this was why, ultimately, I never got in trouble. Sure: it was self defence, but from the entire lot of ‘em, not just from George.