My receding hairline these days reveals a small blue spot above my forehead. And sometimes I’m asked what it is. I explain that it is pencil lead. When I was a 14-year-old high school freshman, an older kid stuck a pencil in my head, a reminder of which my ever-increasing baldness exposes more than half-a-century later.
In the culture of my small-town high school in those days, that was part of an honored tradition called “Freshman Initiation”–at least for boys. By the time I got to college, a similar ritual became even more violent, in most fraternities, and certainly in the “jock dorm” where I resided.
Today, would that be considered “bullying?” Or would it more likely be expressed as insulting, demeaning, embarrassing, even threatening comments about my looks, size, sexuality, intelligence, ethnicity, religion or whatever online in mine or someone’s social network?
Bullying of any sort shouldn’t, of course, be tolerated by authority figures in any institution–most notably, involving kids in school. Those who bully should, by any and every means, be exposed for whatever inadequacy they harbor, the fraudulence of which finds such de-humanizing expression in the “picking on” of anyone sufficiently vulnerable.
And while I’ve never considered myself, at any age, a likely target for bullying, the kid who assaulted me with a pencil–he obviously had enough problems to find me threatening in some way or other. Since that is, after all, what bullying reveals.
As important as it is, however, to expose and even punish bullies, such a defensive approach will never eliminate the problem. Let me explain . . .
Arguably, nothing is more important in the development of modern medicine than the science of immunology The point being that pathogens–most notably, bacteria or viruses–they can never be eliminated. What is necessary is to develop a sufficient immunological response so as to be able to resist the invasive nature of whatever the particular pathogen.
For example, this time of year most of us are getting a “flu shot.” In this case, the paradoxical approach of modern medicine meant to strengthen our immune system. For by getting a small dose of the flu, we are better able to resist getting a worse case.
Are you following the analogy? The same principle applies to our emotional and social (even moral and spiritual) well-being. Bullies are emotional and social pathogens; they are non-self-regulating; they thrive on being invasive. So then, whatever serves to strengthen our emotional and social (even moral and spiritual) immunological response is crucial to our resisting whomever the bullies we may have to deal with. And believe me, there will always be bullies–of some form or other–wherever and whenever.
One way we, whose work is in the service of promoting emotional and social health, speak of this strengthening process–we call it the “developing of a more secure, authentic and solid self”: a process meant to begin early in life; in fact, a process that never ends . . .
[And if you’re interested in what I have termed the “moral and spiritual dimension” of this analogy–from a Christian perspective, at least–read Ephesians 6: 10-17 in the New Testament of the Bible.]
