What is a bully?

Over the course of  the past few weeks I have observed several references to the subject of bullying in Monroe Patch. 

Many of those references were in the form of  columns or Op Ed pieces regarding various aspects of the topic. But another reference to it appeared in the comments section to the piece regarding a situation involving  Ms. Mount. 

As we all know, bullying has been around for a very long time. I would imagine that most people have either been victims of a bully or at least witnessed a bully in action at one time or another. Who knows? You may even be living next door to an adult who is a bully because the behavior is by no means confined to young people.

During my youth in the 1940s and '50s bullying took place in one of three places — at school, in the neighborhood or on a school bus.

When I think back to those days, I realize that one way or another I was bullied in all three places. 

The neighborhood where I grew up in Monroe was very rural. About a quarter of  a mile from my house there was a long, gravel driveway at the end of which lived two families. One of those families had a boy in it who was about three years older than me. Every time I passed his driveway, he would jump out of the woods, knock me off my bicycle and torment me for a while. When he tired of that, he moved on.

I endured it for a long time but finally told my father, who called the boy’s father. I don’t remember the substance of the conversation, but eventually (not right away) it stopped.

Other examples of bullying are when I was tossed out of a coveted seat on the school bus by an older student or when passing in the halls of the school, someone would grab my books from behind me and scatter them all over the floor. There were no backpacks in those days so we carried them under our arms. And who among you has never been shoved up against a row of lockers? I sure was.

The playground was another setting for frequent bullying. Telling a teacher about any of this had consequences possibly worse than previous bullying. You were immediately identified as a snitch and woe unto you from that point on.

Victims of a bully therefore had no recourse but to either fight back like Ralphy in “A Christmas Story” (my favorite movie) or, as is far more often the case, endure it until the bully got tired of you and chose another target.

As you can see, the concept of  bullying in my day had a very narrow definition. It had to involve some sort of physical abuse. Verbal abuse like teasing or spreading gossip didn’t count as bullying.

Today, of course, as evidenced by two recent Monroe Patch articles, words do indeed hurt — sometimes with tragic consequences.

Add to this the Internet and the various social networking sites kids are using these days, and you have a whole new ball game. 

Bullying of any kind is not to be tolerated. I’m happy to see most schools have developed a zero tolerance policy on bullying and most local police forces deal with it very seriously.

But in my day, being bullied was all too often a routine part of growing up. That’s one of the things about the past that I don’t miss.

And that’s life in Monroe, small town America.

Those were the days.