I’ve read much on the heroics of confronting bulliess recently, that too has a dark side… [View all]

[HereSince1628]

My family name sounds like a summer dessert fruit, my siblings and I took a lot of petty name calling about it and learned an inordinate number of adjectives and adverbs that rhymed with it. We were taught to ignore such name calling.

My brother also had carrot red-hair and an inability to sit still in class. It regularly got him tossed into the 1st grade coat room of the old grade school where there wasn’t much opportunity for learning. His 1st year was a progressive descent into being ‘the class dummy’ that others picked on and he failed the grade.
He was marked as a target for physical bullying. It lasted for years. During which my parents regularly berated me for not protecting him. I was taught to confront bullying, and I did.

So one fine Saturday morning in May, the bullies who lived a couple blocks away came onto the dead-end street grabbed my brother and dragged him into the doorway of a dairy.

I heard him shout and went running for him. I found him held down by a boy sitting on him and punching him while the rest of the gang jeered and kicked at him. I straight away tackled and rolled the kid on top of my brother. I jumped up before he did and with all the might my 85 lb 5th grade body could muster I kicked him hard in the side.

He quit fighting and doubled up. His buddies then beat the ever-living crap out of me.

Someone in the dairy had call the cops. They showed up. Everyone scattered--except for me, now also on the ground, and the bully I had kicked. He was rolling in agony and couldn’t sit. I shouted at the police that the cowardly M***** F***** got what he deserved for beating on my brother.

It was not received well by the men in blue.

The cops stuffed me into the back of their black and white, an ambulance took the bully away. I took a ride downtown for the inevitable chat between my parents and ‘the authorities’… I don’t remember much about that other than sitting on a wooden bench in front of a wooden railing behind which was an enormous desk…

I remember returning to school the next week. No one would talk to me. In fact, no one would come near me.

A teacher whose class I’d been in several years earlier told me to go to the Principal’s Office. There was a woman there waiting to take me home. Turned out that I was expelled for the rest of the year.
I had broken a couple of the bully’s ribs and ruptured his spleen which had to be removed in emergency surgery.

I was officially more dangerous than the bully, I was in the phraseology of the day, “a juvenile delinquent.”

Bottom line...there's no certain good outcome to standing up to bullies and fighting them. It's not always going to be seen as heroic, it's usually going to be seen as violent.