With Hazing At Least You Get to Be a Senior Eventually
The only false note in Donnie Darko comes when Donnie gives a sanctimonious little lecture to a bullied kid, interrupting a sanctimonious big lecture by Patrick Swayze, whose take on the situation is that the bully has too much fear and not enough love. “Maybe… you should lift some weights, or uh, take a karate lesson and the next time he tries to do it, you kick him in the balls,” Donnie says. It’s a rare misstep in a movie that’s otherwise basically a love note to outsiders and misfits.
A recent Ask Metafilter deals with a similar topic. “I recently moved into a new house with my elementary school-aged children and am frustrated that a pack of obnoxious kids bully my children every chance they get. … In addition to yelling obscenities and verbal threats daily, they also get physical with my children — pushing, shoving, tripping, throwing things at them, etc.”, writes the poster. “In desperation, I videotaped my kids playing in our driveway and caught the group of brats stealing their baseball equipment and even threatening my oldest boy with a bat.”
What do you suppose one of the most common responses is? The kids should “fight their own battles.” Getting the parents involved will serve only to prove that the kids are “tattletales.” They should learn karate and fight back, just like in the movies.
Imagine that, instead, one of the following questions had been asked:
- “My kids are constantly being bullied and threatened because we are the only nonwhite family in town. The neighborhood kids chant racial epithets and threaten them with baseball bats. What should I do?”
- “My kids are really struggling with fractions. How can I help them?”
Let me go out on a limb and suggest that we would not now be hearing about how racism is just unfortunately a part of life that kids have to learn how to deal with on their own without help from grown-ups. Nor would there be many proponents of the idea that you should never, ever explain numerators and denominators to your kids because they have to learn to “fight their own math battles.” Why the difference in responses? Well, one’s race or ethnicity is not one’s own “fault”, so we can conclude that the “toughen up” respondents do indeed believe that most bullied kids are indeed at fault for the abuse they suffer. And since bullying is about the only childhood problem for which kids are not supposed to receive adult help, we can also deduce that these advice-givers do not believe that it is a serious problem. Bullied kids should just develop some confidence. Or abandon whatever freakish clothes or bizarre mannerisms are inviting the abuse.
This is actually not an uncommon take on peer abuse at Metafilter and other nerd-frequented blogs I read, and all one can conclude is that there are an awful lot of nerds who buy into what the political blogs like to call “exceptionalism.” Sure, I’m a nerd, but I’m not like all those other nerds who are still bitter about being shoved in lockers. I’ve moved on. I’m a good sport. I can laugh with my tormentors. You know what, you guys were right, I really was a big loser. But now I’m cool! Will you pick me for your team now?
As we’re often told, kids have an infallible instinct for picking out the one who doesn’t belong; they can smell insecurity. (We are often told this by the same people who claim that bullies can be fooled by a new haircut or a burst of post-judo-class confidence.) They can spot a nerd from a mile away.
So I’m not sure what one accomplishes by surviving the abuse, and then growing up and telling bullied kids to stop whining. Because it sure doesn’t take an infallible kid’s instinct to sniff out a nerd with a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome.