Bullying often hits us on a personal level

As the community came together last week to promote the You Are More message to children and teens, it seemed the message continues to take root on a whole new level. It’s a message I heard regularly during my years with the Mountain Home News.

While I invested my time to provide coverage of various events promoting the need to stop bullying, there were some I connected with on a very personal level. One of them figuratively punched me in the gut about 10 years ago as I covered an event at Mountain Home Junior High School.

The event was something the family of one student put in motion that quickly escalated into something where hundreds of students came together in a show of solidarity against the bullying they regularly faced at school.

Taking a stand against this type of physical violence and verbal abuse, the event invited these children and teens to take time to take a magic marker and write on their skin the words the bullies tended to call them. The event’s organizers then took photos of these students to illustrate the hatred they often dealt with.

Those words I saw highlighted on the arms and faces of these students really hit me hard because they included the following…

“Ugly...”

“Stupid...”

“Worthless...”

“Fat...”

The list went on…

Unfortunately, these words were all too familiar for the hundreds of individuals that gathered at that “taking a stand against bullying” event back in 2014. Each of them dealt with being bullied or taunted at some point in their life. Together, they wanted to strike out these words with one other…

“Enough!”

In an act of solidarity, these individuals took a stand against this form of prejudice and hatred. At the same time, they brought to light the emotional scars these people carried inside them for years.

In recent years while I served as a substitute teacher in the local area, I took time to share that newspaper story I wrote with the students in the classrooms where I taught. It was my way to connect that story with some of the lessons I taught in which bullying was the focus of our discussion.

I still remember watching one student break down in tears as I read the first several lines of the story I wrote so long ago. Once I finished, I invited her to step into the hallway so we could talk in private to see what it was that made her so upset.

She confirmed what I suspected. Like so many of her peers, someone bullied her while she was at another school.

As we talked, I shared with her one important fact: She wasn’t alone, because bullying was something I connected with on a very personal level.

It involved two brothers, Randy and Mark. During my years of school, they seemed to constantly bully me as well as my brother and our friends. What really irritated me was the way they feigned innocence whenever I confronted them.

After getting sick and tired of dealing with their behavior, I started doing a little digging to see if there was a reason why they acted this way. It turned out, I was possibly right.

Friends I spoke to at school indicated Randy and Mark faced years of physical and verbal abuse while they were younger. While I wasn’t able to confirm this through other sources, they indicated the person inflicting this abuse was their own father.

That alone made perfect sense. After all, most people become bullies as a way of developing a “shield” to help them regain a part of their consciousness they lost due to the abuse they dealt with. If anything, it helped explain why those two spent their teen years smoking, drinking and likely abusing drugs.

Of course, by the time I learned all of this, I had already graduated from high school and was now serving in the Air Force. However, the anger I still felt against both of them seemed to fester within my conscious until I finally realized I needed to do one thing: Let it go.

As I worked to erase the years of resentment buried within my mind, it represented the first step I took in hopes of one day understanding their side of the story. I wanted to hear from them exactly what they dealt with and, more to the point, whether they were able to repair the mental and emotional damage I’m guessing was still inside them.

However, the odds of us running into one another were slim at best, given the fact my family and I now lived in Idaho following my 25-year Air Force career. However, I did have one chance to meet briefly with Randy during our 30th high school reunion back in 2014.

I had just enough time to simply say hello and mention that I knew that he’d served in the Ohio National Guard. It was my way of showing that we had at least one thing in common with regards to the time we served in the U.S. armed forces.

However that conversation ended fast as he dashed away to meet up with our other classmates. Based on the fact I smelled tobacco on his breath, I figured he was going to start “partying” with the others who did the same thing while we were still in high school.

Following that brief meeting, I’d hoped we had time before the reunion ended to eventually meet up once again. All I wanted to ask him was one question… one word…

“Why?”

I wanted to hear from him on what it was in his life that was so messed up that he resorted to bullying as a way to gain a sense of power to overcome the violence he dealt with for probably much of his life. I wanted to fully understand, from his perspective, on why he resorted to picking on me specifically.

If anything, I wanted to have that conversation so we could put the past behind us and actually talk to one another on a personal level. I simply wanted us to merely chat once in a while. Unfortunately, we never had that chance.

On March 22, 2021, Randy passed away after battling cancer for an unspecified amount of time. When I read his obituary in my hometown’s newspaper, I felt a sense of disbelief and struggled to accept we would never have a chance to set things right.

If anything, I only hoped we could simply hear each other’s perspectives so we could at least understand what each of us was going through. In the end, I hoped I could refer to him by one word…

“Friend.”

– Brian S. Orban