We live in a society that produces bullies, as much as large segments of our society hate bullies and try to prevent the spread of abusive behavior.  How does our society produce bullies?  By its values, or lack of same.   Flip the channels, one zero sum game after another where one individual wins everything while all others lose, often humiliated in the process.   Our prisons are overcrowded with largely petty criminals while criminality, on an enormous and destructive scale, proceeds at a record pace for a class that is never held accountable for their third party abuse of the rest of us.  

Those who spent careers working for Enron and got screwed out of their pensions by the greed and malfeasance of Enron’s executives, remember them?  The tip of the iceberg, as it turned out.  Those folks at Enron were merely the vanguard of the millions whose lives and dreams were plundered by the most rapacious among us.

Blah blah blah.  Yes, my grandmother was a leftist, a lifelong trade unionist, she celebrated when the Czar fell and for a while it looked like the People were seizing control of Russia.  She was a girl during the Russian Revolution and can be forgiven for excitedly believing the best, though she wound up bitter in the end.  There is nothing inherently wrong, one could argue, with one person owning 100,000 times more than the next ten million people have.   Our society rewards success, hard work, risk-taking of the right sort, drive, ambition, inherited wealth and social class.  

Anyway, my point is about bullying, and the background is that it’s institutionalized in a competitive society that extols the mythic rugged individual above all else.  Paris Hilton, for example, is one such rugged individual.

I am working with a group of children that has recently changed composition.  Five children from the original workshop now work together with five new participants.  I am focused on improving the program, making soundtracks during our limited time together, improving the quality of the animation, getting kids to buy into the idea of refining their work.   I noticed some tension, the new kids not integrating seamlessly, and set on an idea I thought would help.  I needed a creative and often disruptive kid from the original group to buy into helping others.

I dislike manipulators almost as much as I hate bullies.  It serves me right, in a way, what happened when I decided to deliberately manipulate this kid, though others would suffer for my action.  I saw how important it was to this guy to feel appreciated, so I took him aside, told him how important he is to the workshop, that he’s a natural leader, that he’s the best animator in the group.  I asked for his help.  He was flattered and immediately responded by changing his attitude.  He began to lead the clean-up effort at the end of the sessions and has been a big help.

Last week one of the new kids was lying on his back, the front of his shirt wet, foam all over his chin.   I asked if he was OK and he began laughing, told me he was fine.  I gave him a napkin and he wiped away the drool, then drooled again.  Soon he was lying in the hallway, crying inconsolably.  I couldn’t glean exactly why he was so upset, he wouldn’t say.   It turned out he was a victim of blow-back, the unintended consequence of my manipulative intervention.

The nine year-old I’d taken aside for special attention has, it would be appear, been crowing over the recognition he’d long been craving.  He became, according to three or four different sources, an insufferable prick to his classmates.  Lord of the Flies!   He’d been mocking this kid, who has trouble using a pair of scissors bordering on a kind of phobia.

I must start each session, as I did last term at a certain point, with the reminder that everyone is there to have fun.  And that you can’t have fun if somebody is bothering you or being mean to you.  We are doing animation, something with a lot of moving parts, parts that require looseness, concentration and teamwork.  The workshop doesn’t work unless people are helping each other.   If you can’t help, don’t hurt.    Simple to say, a little hard to do sometimes, but essential.

Unlike in the real world, I have the ability, in this group, to swoop down and gently but firmly intervene.  I can stop a bully in mid-attack, if I see it happening.   The worst bullying often happens behind the scenes, where the deals are made, and merciless rules are set that insure the bully will never be accountable for the pain he causes his victims, karma or no karma.   Playing God in this little group, I will nip this in the bud, as the cliche goes.  Nip it, I say, in the hideous bud.  Watch.