Links, Page 16
The Pain of Bullying (continued)
Nor do I consider out-and-out juvenile criminality to be bullying. Bullying always entails kids who have been singled out for abuse, verbal and/or physical, on a regular, ongoing and personal basis.
Although I, of course, have great sympathy for any kid who has been shaken down for money or other valuables by school thugs, if he or she is just one of many such victims then I would not consider such bullying. Rather, he or she is a crime victim and such a problem calls for entirely different approaches and solutions than does bullying.
True bullying is personal and the motivation is always the same: sadism, the perverse sense of pleasure such twisted individuals derive from inflicting physical and/or emotional pain upon another. From such beginnings came Nazi and Stalinist concentration camp guards.
To answer the question I began with, the boy on the Welcome Page is not myself. He is the only boy in the catalog of photos provided by the website building company that hosts my site. So I chose him to represent the young character in my story and all such kids who suffer or suffered similarly. I don’t have a scanner, and even if I did I would be reluctant to put my own photographs up given the nature of the site. However, upon watching this video, I was startled and haunted by a melancholy sense of déjà vu.
For any who were kind enough to read my story, or will do so in the future, when visualizing “Bobby,” my younger character, please pause this video at 1:04-1:06 to get a close approximation of his physical appearance (though his hair would have been somewhat shorter due to time period differences), complete with private/parochial school uniform of a dress shirt and tie.
More importantly, what this boy is enduring within this (what I hope is a) depiction is exactly what my young character endured—day after day after day—starting gradually in fourth grade and reaching a crescendo in sixth, every time the nun left the room (usually to gab and gossip in the hallway with one of her sisters) and during recess.
