Just got finished reading yet another inspired piece by Mr Poretto.

He speaks about bullies, about bad apples. At the very end of his post, he talks of justice, about removing the apple from the barrel.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Poretto, but I’m gonna take this in a little different direction.

When I was a kid, I was big. Hell, I’m still big. I am 6’2″ and have a 60″ chest. I’m fat, but I’m also strong. As I always have been.

When you’re the youngest- but also the biggest- kid in first grade, you are an easy target for all the bullies and toadies. I hadn’t been in Sister Catherine’s first grade class for a whole day, when I was caught by her trying to take my lunch back from a kid named Randy. Rather than find out the whole story, she just commenced to whacking my head with a yardstick, calling me a big bully and from that moment on, making my life a living hell.

I didn’t cry in front of the other kids, but I cried on the way home, sitting against the corner of the last seat of the schoolbus.

See, if you’re a big kid, you can’t win. If you defend yourself against the other kids, you’re being a bully. If you don’t, you’re labeled a pussy. So I spent most of my elementary education as the object of ridicule.

Day after day, I came home with torn uniforms, broken glasses, broken nose, bleeding ears. All the little kids knew they could do anything they wanted to me because all they had to do if I tried to retaliate was to call for Sister Catherine, who would box my ears and send me home.

My father, who worked 13 days on, one day off, 12 hours a day, was not around much for guidance, in those early years. Mom was a pacifist by nature, and hated confrontation, told me to try not to fight and try not to get in trouble.

So I internalized this, comforted myself with food (still do, have a weight problem to this day) and did what I could. I tried to do as well as I could with my classes but it was hard to get motivated when the teacher wrote things like “pretty good for a fat little bully” everytime i did well. (in her defense: Sister catherine was about as observant as Hans Blix. She had no idea what was going on, and would never bother to find the truth in anything beyond what she happened to observe)(still, there’s a special place in hell for teachers lke that)

I struggled all the way through towards the end of sixth grade. One day, pop came home early because of a plant power outage, and saw me sitting on the front steps in my torn up school uniform and my taped up glasses with the bent earpiece.

“Why aren’t you more careful with your things?”
“I try but the kids at school take away my glasses and push me down and tear the knees of my pants, and steal my tie”

A brief conference indoors with mom.

“You know, your mom and I want you to be happy. We don’t want you to get beat up, or hurt. Your mom tells you not to fight and she’s right, fighting all the time is wrong. Sometimes, you have to show them that you can’t be messed with”

We talked a bit, me crying, letting out all the frustrations of the five years of grade school, him telling me what to do, how to do it. He hugged me and we ate dinner and I went to bed.

Next day, I did what I always did, tried to stay away from the bullies and the toadies, tried to keep my nose clean, like mom always said. Didn’t work any more than it usually did. Randy stopped by to grab my lunch box and fill it full of water out of the storm drain (as was my usual lunchtime treat), and I popped.

I grabbed little randy by the ears and beat his head against the storm drain until he had to be hospitalized, and if Sister Catherine hadn’t come out to drag me away by my ear, I’d probably have killed him. My parents were called, and I sat in the waiting room while Sister Catherine yelled and screamed at my parents about me, and then, my father, in his classic deep voice, started talking.

I never knew what he said, the door was closed, and I never knew what else transpired. I just heard the muffled sound of my father’s voice for a while, then Sister Catherine came out, apologised to me, led my by the hand back to my class and to my seat. We were fast friends for the couple of weeks of shool I had left, and nobody at Holy Name elementary bugged me again, ever.

I look at that, I look at the world we live in, and I see a lot of parallels. America is the big kid who allows itself to be pushed around, because of it’s political correctness, because of a desire to be accepted. No matter what America does as a country, we get a lot of flack just because little pissant countries like France want to see how far they can push us, how much they can get away with.

Just as I finally got sick of the BS, and just as I had Dad to tell me, that sometimes the only solution to violent issues is a violent response, the country needs to awaken to the fact that we have been pushed too far too often by people who have no moral ground to judge our actions. I say it’s time.