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School Violence and China
Two unrelated events collided recently: President Trump went to China, and I learned that the boy who bullied me in high school died. He wasn’t Chinese. But the two events connected in my mind in an unexpected way.
The media, bullies themselves, of course found the China trip largely a disaster. Trump generated predictable coverage, panic over diplomatic protocol, endless parsing of symbolism, and stories about EVs and AI. As they do at home reporting on every Trump gaffe, act of pantomime-like resistance, and negative turn in the Iran War, the purpose is to humiliate tRump and mock the Orange Man.
The other media thing that emerged, especially when nothing really significant came from the Trump-Xi meetings, is some American journalists rediscovered the soft piece, a short video about how strange stuff is in China, or how they venerate their elders, or maybe about a family where the Yoda-like grandpa fought with Mao while his young granddaughter wears a miniskirt. There is also the serious “think” piece, where a journo discovers Chinese math-centric schools have lessons to teach America. But he’ll likely miss the point: America’s deeper school problem is not simply academics.
The sad thing is that there is too much truth to the claim that American education is terrible, and that that contributes to the failures of our society in so many ways. The think piece on Chinese education will however not include anything on bullying or violence in their schools, our pervasive problem. The journo’s Chinese government translator will not tell him about the bullying in local schools. China has its own school problems, including conformity, academic pressure, social exclusion, but American schools often tolerate something more openly physical. In China, social exclusion can be severe, particularly in a world where fitting into peer groups is highly valued. Students may be ostracized for appearing different or violating expectations. In some cases, classmates create online groups on WeChat to spread rumors. Success on exams by itself can determine admission to top universities. This pressure creates stress, anxiety, and competition. Students who perform poorly may become targets of ridicule, while high achievers may be bullied for appearing overly ambitious or socially awkward. Imagine an American kid bullied over a high SAT score.
Chinese schools may be harsh and conformist. American schools often normalize violence. Both systems fail students in different ways. We share humiliation. But the key difference between Chinese high schools and my old one is violence, straight up physical brutality in cases, that trains American kids to be violent themselves, condone violence, quietly endure it, and leaves long-term social scars. My suburban Ohio high school was a violent place, even as it failed to compete statistically with the assault rates in nearby urban schools. My bully, Jimmy, was on the varsity football team when I was barely holding it together on the junior varsity crew. I had stopped growing a year before, and my interest in being one of the smaller kids on the squad was lessening all the time. Jimmy singled me out.
In a coaching era where drinking water at practice was considered a sign of weakness, Jimmy would take away my lunchbreak thermos, meaning nothing to drink halfway through the two-a-day football practices during those 95-degree humid Ohio afternoons. The grit from the high school track in my mouth was awful without a splash of water to wash it down. Jimmy would chug my thermos while I stood there watching. He was bigger than me and I knew nothing about fighting, so I never thought to fight back. He’d often pretend to hold the thermos out to me so I could have a sip then pull it back. He’d offer it to another varsity player, and usually finish the daily show by dumping whatever he did not drink onto the ground. If I ever got anything to drink, it would be room-temperature water snuck from the groundskeeper’s upright spigot. These behaviors exist on a spectrum ranging from cruelty to severe physical violence. They created a ritualized environment in which I felt unsafe in places that are supposed to foster learning and development.
Jimmy would also take a few swings at me, after school, before practice, whenever. But those just hurt. In retrospect the water thing humiliated in a way long after my split lip healed. When I learned recently Jimmy died at a fairly young age while Trump was in China, I did not feel that was a bad thing.
I was not the only person bullied in my high school. Most assaults, like mine, went unreported because of fear of retaliation, masculine embarrassment, or disbelief from adults. Bullying was endemic and what made it worse is how it was allowed by the people who could have helped us. My father brushed it all off over the newspaper as “boys will be boys” and my mother responded by buying me a bigger thermos in hopes a few drops would be left for me post-Jimmy. We had no school resource officers to intervene. The football coaches were with us every minute of every practice, like Marine Corps drill sergeants, except for a brief period during lunch break every damn day when not a single adult was to be found. That’s when the bullying took place. The regular teachers who elsewhere patrolled the school restrooms for under age cigarette smokers somehow never paid any attention to the wood shop corridor. And of course none of the students there never saw nothin’.
Luckily this was before mass shootings became routine. But many of us graduated believing the world was fundamentally unsafe, that authority figures would look away, institutions would fail, and humiliation was simply part of life. That lesson may have had more lasting impact than anything we learned in class.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What Do You Do With the Past?
That’s me in back row of the photo of the old junior high school football team, with the dorky glasses. In an age of apologies and reparations it begs an answer: what do you do about the past?
It starts easy. The adult close to me is Mr. Hammer, the wood shop teacher. Yes, Mr. Hammer. His giggly name somehow still remains amusing to me, some 50 years later. He was a good teacher and coach, fair, even tempered, thought all the stuff we were doing mattered but not too much. I just learned from Google he was a Korean War vet (he never mentioned it) and passed away a few years ago after 24 years of teaching. I have no idea who the other coach is.
My obsession isn’t with the names anyway, it is with what happened to these people and our past. We have not kept in touch, and the last time I spoke with any of them would have been in 1978 when most of us graduated from high school. How many “did well” with life? How many are dead, or in jail, or homeless, or alcoholic? Any of them do something good for the world, maybe as a doctor or teacher? Do any of them ever wonder what happened to me?
Two boys in the front row were star players. They literally had star decals on their helmets so everyone knew, this being in an age before participation trophies. Google says one of them still lives in town but offers no clues as to what happened to him along the way, nothing on the other one. There’s another boy in the photo near the back I learned from Facebook is gay. I didn’t know him well in junior high school, but I wonder now how many of the other boys were gay. No one “came out” back then. We as a team would today be considered completely homophobic based on the language we used. Anyone who made a bad play or fumbled the ball or was even late to the huddle was a f*ggot. If you’re anywhere nearby our age group you also said that word. Everybody did.
But despite the language I am not sure we were homophobic, as we had as little idea what being gay was all about as we had then about heterosexual stuff, absent self-entertainment which likely worked the same way for everyone. This is probably the biggest change the internet brought to society. Kids stop being naive at age two now. I’m as certain the gay kid was hurt by what we all said as I am certain that he said those same words along with us. In 7th grade anything that made you stand out made you someone’s target.
After junior high, trying out for football at my high school meant being bullied by the varsity. If you were lucky they only stole your lunch and made you embarrass yourself singing to the group. Sometimes they took away our water on hot days (water during practice was rationed in this era, to toughen us up.) For others, it was caustic muscle creams smeared in your jock before practice. It went on after the coaches would mysteriously disappear during certain breaks. Adult teachers with clear responsibility to stop it, but who did nothing but encourage it, calling it initiation. I have no idea, some 50 years later, why I voluntarily participated in all this. I believe I was temporarily insane.
Very few guys quit the team, most just endured, some sought empty relief bullying others. I was in that last group, mercilessly teasing a poor kid weaker than me. I was cruel in a way I wish I hated then the way I hate it now. He was an easy target who I thought years ago was a way for me to feel better. I couldn’t beat up the varsity football team who humiliated me, so that kid was their surrogate. Nothing I have done before or after makes me more ashamed.
He’s in that picture, the kid who became the target of my bullying. It’s easier to write this if he has a name, so Ron, though of course that is not his real name which I do remember and cannot forget. We got along OK in junior high, friendly if not friends. But the high school football we went on to was struggle, not fun. The upperclassmen players bullied the younger kids like me endlessly, brutally at times.
I have not been again on that playing field in more than four decades yet I can point now to the exact spot on Google Maps where it all happened. The worst initiation the older kids had was making us fight each other. This usually took the form of whacking each other with tackling dummies, heavy canvas bags. If the big kids did not think we were fighting enthusiastically enough they would step in and continue the assault themselves. It was worse when the bags were wet.
One pointlessly humid Ohio day I was told to stand up and choose my opponent. Usually you picked a buddy with the unspoken understanding the two of you would take it easy on each other. I chose instead to fight Ron. Ron had stopped growing sooner than most of us, Ron had a good heart but wasn’t much of a fighter, Ron thought I was enough of his friend to take it easy. But I did not. Something broke inside me like a summer thunderstorm. When Ron went down I kept hitting him, right in the face with the bag, with the blood from his nose splattering to the point where even the upper class animals running the initiation stopped me. I was never made to fight again. Ron quit the team.
I didn’t stop. I said, with great encouragement from teammates, terrible things to Ron everyday at lunch. I made his life dark. He must have felt his stomach twist in horrible anticipation every day heading into the cafeteria. He tried to make peace with me despite I am sure not having a clue as to why I had become his predator but I refused to back down. The semester ended in exhaustion and I never played a team sport or trusted an authority figure again, my apolitical red pill moment. Ron sat somewhere else for lunch after Christmas break. I’ve had no contact with him since until I found him in that photo last night.
Google found him, too, I think. It looks like he’s a lawyer, made partner in his firm. He’s married. Seems to like to fish. The firm’s website lists a phone number that even now stares at me.
What do you do with the past? Do I call him, apologize, offer some sort of reparation, donate money to some anti-bullying group? Would he want that, would he accept that? Does he remember me, or was I just another forgettable part of high school that got discarded when he went on to his good college and his good law school? Does he live with what he can’t get past? Facebook says he has sons.
He must remember me, the efforts I made to hurt him had to have left some mark. What would he say to an apology? Would he, falsely but graciously accept whatever I said and get off the phone to tell his wife “Honey, you’ll never guess the odd call I had today…” over dinner? Would he listen to me a moment and then uncork decades of anger and resentment, telling me how I hurt him not only that day but forever, that these things don’t go away? Am I one of his ghosts as he is one of mine?
I talked to a psychiatrist friend, who explained the concept of amends used by Alcoholics Anonymous. Making amends is one of the last steps toward recovery, and is premised as “we may stop causing any more harm but that is not the same as repairing the damage we have already caused. We feel a man is unthinking when he says sobriety is enough.” I may have become a better man than I was on that damn football team, but I have done nothing to repair the damage I did.
You start amends by asking permission of the person you harmed. You acknowledge this is to help yourself, that you alone bear responsibility. My excuse – I bullied because I was bullied – is too easy for this task. Some things are always wrong and I should have known that, whether my society or my coaches said it was OK. It is as weak as my tormentors claiming the initiations were all part of toughening us up for the football season, and about building comradery as they too had once been humiliated as freshmen.
Amends demands I not elicit sympathy or make any excuses. I should ask for forgiveness, but not say I am sorry, no remorseful mumbling. If Ron is unable to forgive me, it is my burden. Some debts like that take a long, long time to repay, maybe until forever. You can’t rewrite the past.
The point of amends is asking my victim to help me. It is not about disguising my guilt as an apology. That is what separates amends from something like reparations, where it is the victim who benefits, often monetarily. There may be a place for that, but that place is not part of this old picture and the question about what do you do with the past that it screams at me.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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