When I was in fourth grade, there was a boy who chased me home from school every day. Sometimes he would call my name, laughing. Sometimes he would try to hit me with little rocks as I ran full speed toward the safety of home. I would run through the door crying and out of breath and my mom and dad would call the boy’s parents who would swear that the boy really liked me, but promised that they would talk to him and get him to stop torturing me … but it kept on for months.
Until summer vacation, when I heaved a sigh of relief at hearing that the boy was transferring schools, hoping it was military school or a boarding school very far away. There have always been bullies in the world, and there always will be. Those small-minded insecure people with the big egos looking for someplace to vent, and someone to blame. Sadly, that’s just the way the world works, and it doesn’t always end in high school.
So how do you deal with bullies as an adult when you are no longer a 9-year-old child who can ask their parents to “fix it”? Those grade-school bullies have grown into adult bullies who now run the country and oversee pretty much every aspect of our daily lives.
According to the Anti-Bullying Alliance, 31% of Americans have been bullied as an adult, levels similar to adolescents, and 43% say the negative behavior to harm or intimidate has become more accepted over the past few years.
“Bullying is a coping strategy used to assert control when faced with personal limitations, whether intellectual, physical or otherwise,” says Charles Sophy, a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist and medical director. “A bully gains power in a relationship by reducing another’s and shows little regard for the consequences to a victim’s health or well-being.”
In a 2017 biography compiled by Washington Post journalists who talked to dozens of people who knew Donald Trump as a child, he was described as a loud-mouth bully. At 5 years old, he leaned over his backyard fence to throw rocks at the neighbor’s toddler in a playpen. He beat up smaller classmates. He called the police because someone accidentally bounced a ball in his yard. And at age 8 he gave his music teacher a black eye and told the teacher he didn’t know anything about music.
“When I look at myself in first grade, I’m basically the same,” Trump once told a biographer. “The temperament is not that different.”
No kidding.
And now, as the 47th President of the United States, he stands with his finger just inches from the nuclear trigger. To say it is terrifying is an understatement.
Aristotle once said: “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”
Many years later at a school reunion, I ran into the man who was once the little boy that chased me home from school. I told him how miserable he made my fourth grade. He said he was sorry and swore he doesn’t remember ever doing that to me. He said, “I always really liked you.”
I nodded, smiled and walked away, knowing that I had turned out just fine in spite of the bullying — or maybe because of it. That grade-school experience, and many more to follow, have taught me to not only stand up for myself, but to stand up for those around me who were unable, or too afraid, to stand up for themselves.
Times have not changed all that much I suppose. I am still doing that today. My parents taught me to be kind, stand my ground, and try to remember that everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Strong people stand up for themselves, but the strongest people stand up for others.
It doesn’t matter how big your house is or how many rounds of golf you play or how much money you have. The boy that bullies the neighborhood has the potential to become the man who bullies the world.
Julianne Wood, a longtime resident of Oak Park and River Forest, now resides in Elmwood Park.