Aquarian Weekly 6/26/02
REALITY CHECK

IN DEFENSE OF THE AMERICAN BULLY

According to a bizarre, but apparently all too true, report printed in Reuters this past week, the American Medical Association's House of Delegates has decided to rile up a "bullying awareness" movement. The country's largest doctor's conclave plans on urging fellow colleagues to inform parents of this growing epidemic. According to the group's extensive report, one out of ten kids are victims of bullying. Nearly 15% of children are bullies, and more than half of those have been, or currently are, being bullied.

Last year the AMA's Council on Scientific Affairs concluded that without intervention, "bullying can lead to serious academic, social, emotional and legal problems."

The push for a national campaign to "stamp out bullying" cites the rash of school shootings in recent years resulting from the relentless abuse of schoolchildren at the hands of each other. Extensive psychoanalyses studies of terrorized children have proven that a significant amount of mental afflictions are suffered by bullying, leading to gnawing psychological problems well into adulthood.

Now, as a diminutive runt, and a victim of years of chronic bullying, I am here to say that any such movement to end bullying in our time is capricious, arbitrary and wrong. It is against every law of nature and yet another example of doctors acting like some kind of supreme beings and jamming statistics wherever they might fit the latest cause.

Here at the Reality Check News & Information Desk, we have done our own studies, many of which were of a particularly painful and personal nature. In fact, in a column entitled, "The Truth About Willie & The Underground Sharks" printed in the 2/14/01 issue of this publication, the point was made quite clearly. It began as a response to a letter accusing a close friend, and a main contributor to my last book, Willie, for doling out a series of savage beatings in some downtown NYC rave club.

Following an unprecedented deluge of hate mail, even for this space, the below statement still stands:

"Many kids who gobble Ecstasy find a good beating a welcomed enhancement to the high. There is nothing better than breaking the chains of well-being and peace with a fine stomping at the hands of an anonymous madman whose only purpose in hanging around in the first place is to doll them out like Easter candy."

The crux of the sentimental piece is what I wish to revisit this week in response to the terrible glut of news coming out of the AMA.

You see, what minions of science can never understand is the natural order of God's law. It is survival of the fittest and the predatory instinct of humanity to bully. Of course this has been broached here before regarding the freaks that pass themselves off as agents of the Lord to molest children. The real problem with these holy cretins is they haven't taken enough beatings in their lifetime. The raw element of fear is absence in their hearts. To taste the lash is their wanting.

Face it; the bully holds a special purpose in the grand scheme of "growing up." Hating another for no reason merely because you can kick them around is the right of the brute in society. Learning this at an early age is not only beneficial to our children, but also important to fuel other basic urges like vengeance and spite. The bully helps put these deranged emotions into perspective during a time in our lives when the only aim is to remain invisible, inconsequential, and hopefully unharmed.

The only harm in bullies is the continued coddling of them in order to come up with intellectual or emotional reasons why children pick on each other incessantly. They do it because the ignorant need an outlet. Discovery is part of youth, and to discover verbal, physical and mental abuse from another kid is the right of every American child. They have so few as it is, don't take away the playground.

It's ironic, but a few days before this report was made public I was telling my wife of my days as a Catholic School boy in St. Dominic's on Van Ness Avenue in the Bronx, NY, and of some little shit heel named Troy who thought it fun to challenge me to a fight every friggin' day for the first three years of schooling. This was his mistake, and my good fortune, because despite the fact that I was nothing more than a spit-shine momma's boy with pressed slacks and gooped hair at three foot nothing, I eventually smote him.

You see what Troy did not realize, like most bullies, is that after awhile it really doesn't matter what they do. There is a sense of "nothing left to lose" that wells up in the human psyche, even at age eight, and not too long into our after-school bouts I was routinely hitting him in the face. And in my extensive study, the only thing that really stops a bully is not a team of doctors, but clean shots to the bridge of the nose or square on the jaw. This produces the greatest stream of blood. My study also revealed that bullies hate that.

Sure, interventions and parental group therapy are nice, but a carefully placed fist to the temple sets the bully straight and gives a lifetime of hope for the bullied. I've had plenty of experience with bullies, and it sounds to me like the AMA is bullying us into robbing our kids of childhood's most precious victory, the ass-whupping of the deserved. Life is about a series of defeating bullies; the sooner we understand it, the better.

It is quite Zen when you think about it. Without pain there can be no pleasure, and without defeat there is no victory.

I conclude with a quote from my 2/19/01 column:

"The underground is filled with natural-selection beasts like Willie, and so are politics and Wall Street and suburbia for that matter. He is the bully, the boogieman, the great equalizer reminding everyone that humanity is not the home of compassion, but the result of brutal evolution, where the strong and maniacal unleash their frustration on those who might live under the illusion that they are somehow more refined or "better" than the rest. We shouldn't shun or fear them. The idea is to befriend these mutants, pull them close to your bosom and mother their intentions, or at the very least, bring a notebook and study their habits."

Today I am five foot nothing and encounter bullies of every sort everyday, but thanks to Troy I still keep the notebook and study the habits.

Who's your Troy?

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