When I was in grade school I figured out that one of the other kids had things way worse than I did. He had genuine mental deficiencies and zero social savvy to speak of. For a brief period in either fourth or fifth grade I decided that somebody needed to be his friend and that somebody might as well be me.
It didn’t last long, as being his friend was genuinely thankless[1] and I was all of, what, ten years old?
At some later point I remember trying to figure out why all the kids picked on me. My teacher reminded me of the time that I’d tried to be a friend to the other kid and informed me that I had gotten respect for doing that. That was news to me. The lesson I learned was that I got picked on because I wasn’t good enough at being selfless and giving.
I think there was a secondary lesson, too: people like you more if you do the things they don’t want to deal with. Well, they might not like you more, but they’ll “respect” you more. Joy.
-----------------------------
This, inevitably, is where the church fits into the narrative. This is also why I’ve always had a hard time trying to figure out how the church fits into the narrative. There are really two notions of the church in my mind: the place I went for shelter and the place that made everything so, so much worse.
On the one hand, I started hanging out at church a lot and doing all of the youth group stuff because no one picked on me there. Well, at least, not as many people picked on me.[2] It was nice.
I also figured out that there’s a sort of automatic route to being respected in the church. All you have to do is show up, know things about the Bible, and know how to articulate the things you know. I was very good at doing all three of those things.
The drawback in church is far more insidious than a kid calling you names, though. I had defenses for you basic, run of the mill high school jackass. I had no defenses for the Cosmic Jackass.
The standard message of Evangelical Christianity is “you’re not good enough.” I had a hard time with that, since I was already pretty damned sure that I was a worthless bag of suck without the infallible word of god informing me that, yes, yes I was.[3]
-----------------------------
There are three basic human responses to witnessing misery: you can try to take steps to help, you can ignore it, or you can actively do things to make it worse. Choosing to do nothing and choosing to cause active harm really aren’t that different, as benign neglect is still a form of neglect. The thing about being the person who chooses to try to stop things is that you will often fail. Misery is too big, too strong, to hard to understand.
Misery also doesn’t scale. The personal misery is worse than the systemic misery. It’s possible to look at homelessness and say, “We can fix this by doing A, B, and C.” It’s not possible to look at a little kid who gets picked on and doesn’t know what to do and say, “We can fix this.” It’s a tiring, thankless, never-ending task.
I know this because I’m 31 years old and I still don’t know how to cope with things that happened half a lifetime ago. I also know that I’ve showed my ass on any number of occasions when people were just trying to help or didn’t even know they’d hit a raw nerve because they didn’t know me then and I’m not a big fan about talking about it.
-----------------------------
I think you choose your camp young. You’re either someone who tries to understand and fix misery or someone who doesn’t. This isn’t to say that you’re always in one camp or another. It’s also pretty obvious to me that everyone is going to not notice misery or try not to think about it from time to time.
I chose my camp in grade school, I suppose. I saw a kid who needed a friend and I tried to be his friend. I didn’t get anything out of it and failed at the whole enterprise.
Then when I failed I was told by a teacher that maybe if I hadn’t failed all the other kids wouldn’t have picked on me so much. I honestly think that she was well-meaning. I think she was trying to find helpful suggestions to fix the situation.
There is only one solution to that problem, though: the bullies need to be stopped from being bullies.
-----------------------------
This is where Christianity becomes monstrous. I found a measure of solace in church. Even that wasn’t complete, though, because I kept getting the message reinforced that I totally suck. All of the reasons that I sucked, though, were things that could theoretically be fixed.
It gradually dawned on me that the church was treating other people far, far worse than it treated me and that the entire institution permitted and even encouraged such mistreatment. That wasn’t the reason I left. It’s certainly a huge part of the reason I wouldn’t ever go back.[4]
-----------------------------
There are truly horrible people in the world. On some level I have to give the kids who picked on me a pass, since what the fuck does anybody know when they’re young?
If any of those people grew up to become the sort of person who argues against anti-bullying measures, though, they’d better hope they’re never in a position where they need me to help them with anything. There are adults who interfere in the affairs of the bullies and the bullied who don’t have the best interests of the victims at heart, after all. Sure, they say they do. It’s always about the children and all.
They just need to learn how to toughen up. It builds character.
Bullshit. I had more character than those assholes in the fourth grade.
-----------------------------
I’m 31 years old. I have a mortgage, a car payment, and a dog. I also divide the vast majority of the world into categories of “people who have hurt me” and “people who just haven’t gotten around to hurting me yet.” I’ve also been crying off and on for 24 hours because someone violated my trust in a way that’s really probably not a big deal to most people.[5]
If I could trade all that in for a little less character building between, say, ages 5 and 18, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat.
-----------------------------
[1]His parents did not help. My parents were behind his once during a junior high parent-teacher conference that went at least half an hour over the limit because they were haranguing the teachers on all the things they were doing wrong. At one point in high school one of my friends tore a couple pages in a magazine because the guy just would not leave us alone and it seemed like a good idea. I was a more-or-less innocent bystander to the whole thing but his mother called my mother and yelled at her. After my friend had confessed to the act and she said that such a thing was impossible because he was a good kid and I was a little shit.
By the way, for those keeping track at home, my list of misdeeds in high school consisted of smoking about three cigarettes and deciding I didn’t want anything to do with that particular activity.
There’s a lesson to be learned here, kids: that’s what you get for trying to be friends with that weird kid who has no friends because he’s completely and totally socially inept and his parents are certifiable. Although I did get to hear my mother rip his mother a new one over the phone, which was awesome. She was scared of my mom after that.
[2]My sister was friends with a guy when they were in junior high youth group together. By the time we hit high school or college age she hadn’t talked to him in years and had nothing nice to say about him. I once asked her why and she told me it was because he’d been a real ass behind my back.
The reason that came up was because he later ended up being a friend of sorts and I was friends with his siblings. He was a genuine asshole but always got the “true man of god” treatment because he was really good at playing the game. I always felt like I was doing something wrong by not liking him. There’s a lesson to be learned there.
[3]This is the sort of assertion that always gets a knee-jerk, “Hey, no it isn’t!” This is a thought that requires way more than a paragraph, but the simple fact of the matter is that the entire platform upon which that house is built is the base assumption that everyone is unfailingly awful and the only way to combat that is Jesus. So then when things go badly the only possible answer is that the person experiencing bad things must have failed somehow.
That is an awful, wicked thing to teach a kid who has a hard time summoning the courage to get up and go to school in the morning.
[4]The fact that I quit religion is a bigger factor, though. So this is somewhat speculative.
[5]And listening to the Counting Crows’ “Raining in Baltimore” and “A Murder of One” over and over and over again. I think that August and Everything After has to be one of the 10 best albums of the ‘90s.
It didn’t last long, as being his friend was genuinely thankless[1] and I was all of, what, ten years old?
At some later point I remember trying to figure out why all the kids picked on me. My teacher reminded me of the time that I’d tried to be a friend to the other kid and informed me that I had gotten respect for doing that. That was news to me. The lesson I learned was that I got picked on because I wasn’t good enough at being selfless and giving.
I think there was a secondary lesson, too: people like you more if you do the things they don’t want to deal with. Well, they might not like you more, but they’ll “respect” you more. Joy.
-----------------------------
This, inevitably, is where the church fits into the narrative. This is also why I’ve always had a hard time trying to figure out how the church fits into the narrative. There are really two notions of the church in my mind: the place I went for shelter and the place that made everything so, so much worse.
On the one hand, I started hanging out at church a lot and doing all of the youth group stuff because no one picked on me there. Well, at least, not as many people picked on me.[2] It was nice.
I also figured out that there’s a sort of automatic route to being respected in the church. All you have to do is show up, know things about the Bible, and know how to articulate the things you know. I was very good at doing all three of those things.
The drawback in church is far more insidious than a kid calling you names, though. I had defenses for you basic, run of the mill high school jackass. I had no defenses for the Cosmic Jackass.
The standard message of Evangelical Christianity is “you’re not good enough.” I had a hard time with that, since I was already pretty damned sure that I was a worthless bag of suck without the infallible word of god informing me that, yes, yes I was.[3]
-----------------------------
There are three basic human responses to witnessing misery: you can try to take steps to help, you can ignore it, or you can actively do things to make it worse. Choosing to do nothing and choosing to cause active harm really aren’t that different, as benign neglect is still a form of neglect. The thing about being the person who chooses to try to stop things is that you will often fail. Misery is too big, too strong, to hard to understand.
Misery also doesn’t scale. The personal misery is worse than the systemic misery. It’s possible to look at homelessness and say, “We can fix this by doing A, B, and C.” It’s not possible to look at a little kid who gets picked on and doesn’t know what to do and say, “We can fix this.” It’s a tiring, thankless, never-ending task.
I know this because I’m 31 years old and I still don’t know how to cope with things that happened half a lifetime ago. I also know that I’ve showed my ass on any number of occasions when people were just trying to help or didn’t even know they’d hit a raw nerve because they didn’t know me then and I’m not a big fan about talking about it.
-----------------------------
I think you choose your camp young. You’re either someone who tries to understand and fix misery or someone who doesn’t. This isn’t to say that you’re always in one camp or another. It’s also pretty obvious to me that everyone is going to not notice misery or try not to think about it from time to time.
I chose my camp in grade school, I suppose. I saw a kid who needed a friend and I tried to be his friend. I didn’t get anything out of it and failed at the whole enterprise.
Then when I failed I was told by a teacher that maybe if I hadn’t failed all the other kids wouldn’t have picked on me so much. I honestly think that she was well-meaning. I think she was trying to find helpful suggestions to fix the situation.
There is only one solution to that problem, though: the bullies need to be stopped from being bullies.
-----------------------------
This is where Christianity becomes monstrous. I found a measure of solace in church. Even that wasn’t complete, though, because I kept getting the message reinforced that I totally suck. All of the reasons that I sucked, though, were things that could theoretically be fixed.
It gradually dawned on me that the church was treating other people far, far worse than it treated me and that the entire institution permitted and even encouraged such mistreatment. That wasn’t the reason I left. It’s certainly a huge part of the reason I wouldn’t ever go back.[4]
-----------------------------
There are truly horrible people in the world. On some level I have to give the kids who picked on me a pass, since what the fuck does anybody know when they’re young?
If any of those people grew up to become the sort of person who argues against anti-bullying measures, though, they’d better hope they’re never in a position where they need me to help them with anything. There are adults who interfere in the affairs of the bullies and the bullied who don’t have the best interests of the victims at heart, after all. Sure, they say they do. It’s always about the children and all.
They just need to learn how to toughen up. It builds character.
Bullshit. I had more character than those assholes in the fourth grade.
-----------------------------
I’m 31 years old. I have a mortgage, a car payment, and a dog. I also divide the vast majority of the world into categories of “people who have hurt me” and “people who just haven’t gotten around to hurting me yet.” I’ve also been crying off and on for 24 hours because someone violated my trust in a way that’s really probably not a big deal to most people.[5]
If I could trade all that in for a little less character building between, say, ages 5 and 18, I would. I would do it in a heartbeat.
-----------------------------
[1]His parents did not help. My parents were behind his once during a junior high parent-teacher conference that went at least half an hour over the limit because they were haranguing the teachers on all the things they were doing wrong. At one point in high school one of my friends tore a couple pages in a magazine because the guy just would not leave us alone and it seemed like a good idea. I was a more-or-less innocent bystander to the whole thing but his mother called my mother and yelled at her. After my friend had confessed to the act and she said that such a thing was impossible because he was a good kid and I was a little shit.
By the way, for those keeping track at home, my list of misdeeds in high school consisted of smoking about three cigarettes and deciding I didn’t want anything to do with that particular activity.
There’s a lesson to be learned here, kids: that’s what you get for trying to be friends with that weird kid who has no friends because he’s completely and totally socially inept and his parents are certifiable. Although I did get to hear my mother rip his mother a new one over the phone, which was awesome. She was scared of my mom after that.
[2]My sister was friends with a guy when they were in junior high youth group together. By the time we hit high school or college age she hadn’t talked to him in years and had nothing nice to say about him. I once asked her why and she told me it was because he’d been a real ass behind my back.
The reason that came up was because he later ended up being a friend of sorts and I was friends with his siblings. He was a genuine asshole but always got the “true man of god” treatment because he was really good at playing the game. I always felt like I was doing something wrong by not liking him. There’s a lesson to be learned there.
[3]This is the sort of assertion that always gets a knee-jerk, “Hey, no it isn’t!” This is a thought that requires way more than a paragraph, but the simple fact of the matter is that the entire platform upon which that house is built is the base assumption that everyone is unfailingly awful and the only way to combat that is Jesus. So then when things go badly the only possible answer is that the person experiencing bad things must have failed somehow.
That is an awful, wicked thing to teach a kid who has a hard time summoning the courage to get up and go to school in the morning.
[4]The fact that I quit religion is a bigger factor, though. So this is somewhat speculative.
[5]And listening to the Counting Crows’ “Raining in Baltimore” and “A Murder of One” over and over and over again. I think that August and Everything After has to be one of the 10 best albums of the ‘90s.
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