When bullies win

My parents still live in the suburb I grew up in, so while paying them a visit, I decide to take Emily and our fivemonth-old, Gus, on a Jonathan Goldstein reality tour. “This is where I found a two dollar bill! This is the house where my first love lived!” For the tour’s grand finale, we head into the schoolyard of my old elementary school. There’s much I don’t remember about the place, but it does evoke lost memories. Mostly of the kids I knew. Among them, my best friend Alan.

I was a boy with a lisp forced to wear corduroy leisure suits, and Alan was a chubby kid who had a habit of tucking his red turtleneck into his underwear and using Yiddish expressions like “Oy vey.” We were both targets for bullying and together, we spent our days cowering from our classmates. The girls serenaded Alan with “Fatso Man,” a song they sang to the tune of the Village People’s “Macho Man,” and the boys made sure I spent most of my daylight hours breathing armpit air from deep within the recesses of a headlock.

Photography day was a terrible day for us both. The photographer made “jokes” that revolved around The Dukes of Hazzard. He’d call the girls “Daisy,” the brown-haired boys, “Luke” and the blond-haired boys, “Bo.” Nerds like me were dubbed “Enus.” But the worst moniker was reserved for the fattest kid in each class. This was the child he referred to as “Boss Hogg.” And that honour always fell to Alan. That the name-calling got all the other kids in the class into a laughing good mood, made the photographer’s job easier.

“I hope Gus never has to go through that kind of bullying when he’s in school,” Emily says at the close of the tour.

So do I. But at least back then we grew up thinking that the bullies would, in the end, lose. It was what the movies we watched and the comics we read taught us. It was even what The Dukes of Hazzard preached. Kids like me and Alan were imbued with a vague sense of hopefulness. But that the biggest bully – someone who’s mocked people with disabilities, judged women based on their bodies, and called for violence against those he doesn’t like – has achieved the highest office in America is a bad lesson for kids. This generation of children will grow up seeing that the bullies do win, and that scares me more than the prospect of my son having to endure headlocks from kids who don’t know any better.