Bully and Bullying

When I was a kid, there was a boy down the street who liked to bully me.  I might have told you about him before.  His name was Jimmy and his bullying took on different forms depending on what time of the year it was. 

In warm weather, he took my bike on the way home for lunch just before I got home and then he rode around on it until just before it was time to go back to school.  If I had been more clever, I could have said something like, "So you like riding girls' bikes?"  But I wasn't all that clever and what he did bothered me a lot.  In cold weather he followed behind me and hit me with snowballs that melted and went down my shirt until I was even colder.

So I knew what it was to be bullied. 

And it made me afraid and hesitant, especially in the mornings.  After a while,. I didn't want to go to school and sometimes I'd fake being sick.  Believe it or not, I did the old thermometer in the hot chocolate trick and it worked.  Even with the mother's famous rule -- if you say home you stay in bed -- I'd still be happy to be at home rather than go to school.

Somewhere along the line, Jimmy must have moved because I just don't remember him anymore.  After kindergarten, I had kids to walk which was much, much better.

But whenever I hear about bullied kids, it's hard not to remember that feeling. 

On another occasion when I was probably about ten, we went to Westgate Mall.  Across the street from my house was a crossover street that ended at a park.  If you walked across the expanse of the grassy park, it ended up at Westgate Mall, a new mall but uncovered.  There were at least three of us walking that day and when we reached a point in the hike where we were the most vulnerable in the grassy expanse, a car appeared out of seemingly nowhere and it chased us.  Let me tell you, being chased by a car is terrifying.  The boys who did that should have been seriously punished but they weren't.  We weren't even clever enough to get their license plates.  We just ran as fast as we could.

So from that point on, I didn't want to go to Westgate Mall via the shortcut. 

The anti-bullying programs seem to work, but they only work if the bullies are identified at as young an age as possible.  Bullying behavior is a sign of something that needs to be fixed. 

Today I think about the two kids from Brunswick who committed suicide.  One of them for sure was bullied.  Let's pray for them and all of the other kids who are on the wrong side of a troubled kid's aggressions.