When we got a little older, I remember following his lead as he’d look up at our house to make sure our mother wasn’t peeking out the window, and then stuff the winter hat she made him wear into the mailbox. I stuffed mine in, too, because if he was too cool to wear a hat, I wanted to be as well. When we got off the bus that afternoon, we’d grab our hats and saunter up the driveway like the angels we never were.
And then in the days just before my brother stopped riding the bus, before he saved money for his own car, I remember how he used to kick pebbles across the road and into the field on the other side. The sun would be coming up in late fall (our bus picked us up at the ungodly hour of 7:00 a.m.), and when I picture him there now, I imagine him kicking stones at the sun with all the grace and rage of a beautiful boy caught in a world that wasn’t ready for him.
These are the things I want to remember about my brother. His joy. His skill. His coolness. I loved him so. But I also remember getting on the bus, almost always in the same order. Me first, then my sister, then my brother. I’d sit up front, my sister in the middle, and my brother, bravely, day after day, way in the back.
From my seat behind the driver I could look up into the big mirror she used to supposedly keep her eye on things and see my sister busily talking to her friend, and farther back, my brother. I can see his dirty-blond hair. I can see his face, turning bright red. I can see his eyes, watering. I can see the boys sitting behind him, leaning into his face, saying words that penetrated his heart in some permanent way that shaped him and changed his course for years to come. I see them smash his head against the window. And I see the bus driver, staring straight ahead, humming to the radio.
And then the names.
Faggot.
You little faggot.
Sicko.
These images and words have stayed with me all my life. They have stayed with me just like the other stories my brother told me much later. About how his fourth-grade teacher used to torment him because he was new. From away. But mostly because he was different. We would joke about how Mr. L. had gaydar and what that really meant. But we knew it wasn’t actually that funny. He told me about how his eleventh-grade teacher said he should just quit school because he would never amount to anything. How he took him out in the hallway during history and slammed him up against the locker, called him a loser. And how, when he and his two best friends went to the principal to report the teacher, the principal didn’t believe them.
I was twelve when the real fighting started. I remember the screaming and the crying as my parents pleaded with him not to smoke. Not to drink. Not to do drugs. Not to stay out late. Not to go there or there or there. Not to leave. I remember the pain on his face as he struggled to explain how desperate he was to get out and be with the people who accepted him. I see the agony. The frustration. He just wanted to be loved. To be understood. But he didn’t have the words to explain it all. And my parents didn’t know how else to protect him. And so he ran away.
The words we hear about ourselves as children are the words we believe until we grow up to know better. I think back now and wonder how different things might have been if just one person with authority had stood up and said “Stop.” Or “No.” If we’d lived in a time when different was cool. When gay was okay.
But we didn’t. And so kids like my brother were on their own. Even the people who loved him so desperately felt helpless. The words he’d heard all through his childhood had been planted so deeply, it would take years to shed them.
We can’t do this anymore. We can’t pretend that words are just words. We can’t say kids will be kids. We can’t dismiss cruelty as a rite of passage. We can’t be onlookers. We can’t say, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” We can’t teach our kids to not step forward and say “Stop.” And “No.” We have to say it. We have to shout it.
School administrators can’t say it’s up to the parents. Parents can’t say it’s up to the teachers. Teachers can’t say it’s not their job. And kids can’t say, “I was too afraid to tell.” Every single one of us has to play our role if we’re serious about putting an end to the madness. We are all responsible. We must be.
Stop.
No.
They are simple words. And they can save lives.
Memory Videos
by Nancy Garden
Memory videos play in my mind whenever I hear another child has been bullied.
Take one:
I’m seven years old, walking home from school in Crestwood, New York. I’m walking carefully because I’m not sure where James is, and I’m afraid of him. He’s bigger and older and stronger than I, and every time he goes after me, he wins. This time, though, I’m not as afraid as usual because Daddy has taught me to box so I can fight James.
Suddenly, just as I reach the big hill that goes down to our neighborhood, James darts out from behind a bush and attacks me, punching hard. I make fists and remember which hand guards and which punches—but before I can protect myself or swing, James grabs my arms and pins them behind me, and I burst into tears.
Another time, James and I fight about a dog book while our dogs and my friends watch. Suddenly James ends up facedown on the ground—perhaps my friends have pushed him. His pants slip, and my friends giggle and laugh, pointing to his exposed brown buttocks, speckled with white spots.
James is African-American and the rest of us are white. He’s the only black child in my class and probably in the school.
Now that I’m older, I wonder if James became a bully because he’d been bullied himself. That seems likely, and I remember, too, that sometimes he threw up in class after lunch. After the first or second time, the teacher said to us, “When James throws up, I want all of you to get up and leave the room.” She showed him no sympathy and was clearly not going to let any of us show him sympathy either.
Many bullied kids become bullies themselves. Some bullies even become adult criminals.
I was sorry for James when he threw up, but I didn’t do anything about it. Did I laugh with my friends when I saw James’s buttocks? My memory video doesn’t show me that. But it does show me that I didn’t say “Stop!” or “Don’t laugh!” or “Let him up!”
I’d gone from being a victim to being a bystander.
Bystanders who do nothing give bullies permission inadvertently to go on being bullies. Most are afraid they’ll lose friends or be bullied themselves if they help victims or report bullies, and some feel guilty for years afterward.
TAKE TWO:
My mother, whose parents and older siblings were born in Germany, is telling me a story. She’s comforting me because a girl has told me no one likes me because I smile too much. Worse, two boys have been chasing and attacking me. Kids have been calling me “four eyes,” too. Mum says, “When I was a Girl Scout during World War One, other children yelled ‘German Spy!’ at me as I walked to and from school in my uniform.”
Today I have no idea what prompted the name-calling or what was the reason for my unpopularity. But the boys who chased me were children of recent immigrants; had they been bullied, too, like James, for being “different,” “other,” “foreign”? My video doesn’t tell me that, but I think Mum was trying to explain that many children are bullied—not just me.
And of course she was right.
At the August 2010 government summit about planning a national antibullying strategy, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that every year, 8.2 million kids are bullied at school. He also said that in 2007, more than 900,000 kids in secondary schools reported they’d been cyberbullied (bullied online).