Bully For Us!

I'm a post-menopausal (albeit barely), middle-aged, suburban mother of boys, and I've become morbidly preoccupied with the numbingly sad tale of Phoebe Prince. She is everygirl, and her story has seized the public imagination as others before it have failed to. I will not be the only parent to extemporize or fulminate about this, but the blogosphere exists so that every frustrated bloviator can release the vile and pestilent vapors that are congregating within. Bullying, and its entire range of intensity and toxicity, is not exclusive to small towns like my own (or like South Hadley, Massachusetts, where Phoebe ended her short life). The Japanese culture of shame has bred a lethal tradition of, literally, bullying children to death - with the full knowledge, and tacit complicity, of parents and adults. Parents are so humiliated when their children become the "nails that must be hammered down," that they sorrowfully accept the shame rather than battling the community assault. The Japanese example is extreme, but it reveals strains that persist within our own society. I believe that homogeneous, insular communities are especially susceptible to this pathology; Japan is a densely-populated, island nation, where conformity and adherence to norms are enshrined as essential to peace, prosperity, and even survival.
Rebecca Goldstein's novel, The Mind-Body Problem, presents the concept of "mattering zones," and how individuals are united or separated, ultimately, by "what matters" to them. I believe that communities will tend to marginalize outliers from their mattering zones, unless they proactively decide not to. I should have been bully-bait as a child - I was overweight, unathletic, and bookish, but my only protracted problems with bullies occurred during the summer in the superficially idyllic beachfront community where my family was fortunate enough to own a rambling, weathered, shingled house - the stuff most dreams are made of. In my working-class school district, most girls were not active in sports, and, despite my immersion in Nancy Drew and Little Women, I was as interested in clothes, boys, rock music, popular TV series, and the Boston Bruins, as the next chick. I could never summon up great enthusiasm for sailing or, more specifically, beetle-cat racing, which defined my world in July and August. I was a pariah, and could do nothing to change it.
Parents rarely help; my own family would simply admonish me to lose weight, if I complained that other kids called me fat (most summers, I was plump, but within life-insurers' "healthy-weight" guidelines). I would hear exhortations to try harder in the races I dreaded, although I sailed better than some girls who were accepted. I also couldn't understand why I should try to ingratiate myself with people whom I didn't like, and who didn't like me. My parents and older sisters heaped scorn on the one local woman who was actually colorful and eccentric - a transplant from mitteleuropa; if I dressed or disported as I liked, I was told I looked like "A----- F------," whose scarves and long skirts, and terpsichorean impulses were perceived as the source of the Alzheimer's disease she succumbed to in later years. I wholeheartedly preferred her comportment to the compact, joyless, women in their Peter-Pan-collared blouses and unflattering Bermuda shorts, who peopled our particular isle. She, unlike them, presented evidence of a heart an soul.
Once a child is labeled a loser, in tightly-knit enclaves like this, there is no escape. If I tried to fit in, I was ridiculed even more loudly for "trying to look cool." Conversely, some children are pronounced "cool" early - very early - usually, for social or athletic confidence; they may be losers in other settings, but will always have loyal fans. They will gravitate back to their summer communities, or hometowns, clinging to the status that the larger world denies them. Everybody encounters these local legends outside of their "mattering zones;" adulatory fanfare precedes the introduction, which is an inevitable letdown - he, or she, is an utterly unremarkable person, whose childhood associates still consider glamorous, hilarious, and preternaturally cool.
Everybody wants to matter somehow, somewhere, to someone. Children will always matter, beyond all reason and definition, to their parents; parents need to help their children identify, and occupy, their own "mattering zones." If a school (and its community at large) values team sports disproportionately, an unathletic child should not be pressured into conforming, especially when the standards are unrealizable. Parents should try to offer other lifelines to their children; it would be lovely to see schools offer a wider assortment of extracurricular activities, and for small towns to nurture community events apart from competitive sports, but most families cannot effect these changes single-handedly. In times of austerity, it's very difficult for many families to justify the expenses of music, dance, or art lessons, much less private schooling; unfortunately, these are the very avenues that allow a non-conforming child to "matter."
In the blue-collar public schools I attended, through eighth grade, I occasionally experienced minor harassment, or bullying of the traditional, Hollywood variety. There were some tough girls - they smoked, wore heavy make-up, cussed, carved their boyfriends' names into their arms with razorblades - I longed to be more like them, but they undoubtedly understood, better than I, what our power relationship was. I, and most of my friends, belonged to our gloomy city's elite, and any actual confrontation was bound to hurt the tough kids more than us. They could see the houses we lived in, and the resources that the school system lavished on its more promising and privileged students. My encounters with the "bad girls" were more comical than menacing, and provided fodder for mimicry among my peers ("ya think ya can take me?!?!ya flip bastahd!!"). No adult I knew would ever, implicitly or explicitly, take their side; their own parents would probably take straps to them, if the episodes were reported. Needless to say, my own parents never encouraged me to ingratiate myself with this particular cohort, nor did teachers exalt them as shining examples for others.
My own children spent their elementary and middle-school years in a radically different community. The odd working-class family was usually marginalized, and their kids were the only ones ever labeled as bullies; they were as likely to be prey as they were predators. Bullying is an abuse of power: to degrade and humiliate others simply to show that one can. We call it tyranny or despotism in political leaders; imperialism and colonialism in nations. The most insidious, lethal bullying is rarely physical in white, suburban America; it is the systematic, relentless marginalization, even dehumanization, of the young people who don't conform to prevailing expectations or requirements. My neighbors would never overtly ostracize newcomers for racial or ethnic reasons, but they would if they maintained their lawns or houses differently, or played exotic-sounding music loudly, or if their kids smelled funny. A kid who'd prefer listening to classical music or practicing Tai Ch'i to watching American Idol or playing Grand Theft Auto insults the tribe, and should expect to be eschewed. Imagine shunning football in West Texas, or hockey in Canada; this is iconoclasm, bordering on heresy - the errant child has repudiated the tribe's most cherished rituals and totems. Studious, techno-geeks learn to provide wide berth to jocks, and to accept their caste status. Some of the most talented athletes in my older son's class were distance runners, but their accomplishments outside the classroom were always ignored (they had been pronounced nerds in elementary school, of course), while the most mediocre team athletes (on consistently dreadful squads) were celebrated, and strutted triumphantly through the hallways, sporting their uniforms. The newcomer actually, at times, has a better chance at breaking social barriers than the kid who was labeled an outlier in early childhood. No external modifications (e.g. weight loss, wardrobe or hairstyle modifications, academic or extracurricular achievements, etc.) will alter the immutable caste assignment. One of my older son's few friends in town is a girl who qualified, as a sophomore, for the high school's varsity competition cheerleading squad, and is, by most unbiased standards, among its more attractive members, yet she has never been fully accepted by the "Alpha Girls" in town; she was proclaimed a misfit in elementary school, and remains one today.
I will have more to say on all of this, but especially about the inadequacies of our current public education establishment, and the fanciful expectations parents have regarding their schools' willingness or competence to confront the problem of bullying. Until then, love your children, and remind them that they have and deserve the undying, unconditional love of their parents and, if believers, of their Supreme Creator.