Joys of Adolescence

Fayetteville sounds like a nice place to live. It's a medium-sized town nestled in the Ozark Mountains, home of the University of Arkansas. Fayetteville's citizens enjoy an above average level of income and education. Wikipedia's photos reveal a leafy, quiet town, a nice blend of modern and traditional collegiate architecture. Fayetteville's been named one of Forbes Magazine's "Top 10 Best Places in America for Business and Careers."

Billy Wolfe, 15, lives in Fayetteville. He's a sophomore at the local high school. But Fayetteville is not one of the top towns in America for Billy. Kids don't like Billy. No one really knows why. But, I mean, they really don't like him. They beat him up. Regularly. For fun. For years. Since he was 12.

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

It's sort of like that, I guess. They've knocked Billy out, unconscious. They've hit his face so hard that his braces were embedded in his cheek. His middle class parents have come to school to pick him up, and have had to watch him spitting out blood. They have a stack of photos showing the bruises and black eyes he's incurred over the years. When kids don't hit Billy, they call him names. They grab his text books and write things about him on the pages.

Last year, they got together and put up a Facebook page entitled "Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe." Pretty cool, huh? Kind of a bonding exercise for his classmates.

No, Billy isn't popular. He's scared of going to school. His stomach churns each morning. The school doesn't do much. Some teachers think, for unexplained reasons, that he brings it on himself. They just don't like the cut of his jib? Maybe it's because he has a reading disability? They've blamed him for starting the fights. A video of an unprovoked asssault by his classmates proved them wrong. His parents are suing some of his classmates, and may sue the school district.

Billy's story is told today in a feature article by Dan Barry in the New York Times. There are no easy answers to Billy's plight. As Barry points out, "schoolyard anthropology can be so nuanced." It's hard for adults to understand what goes through the immature heads of kids that age. But we know that a pack of wild animals will turn on one of its smaller or weaker members. They'll kill him, apparently for sport. The mothers of some species will themselves kill the runt of the litter. Why should we assume that a 14 or 15 year old kid has progressed much further along the road to civilization?.

But the question keeps gnawing at me: where were the teachers?

I should have been a prime target for bullying. I was usually the smallest kid in the class, the little imp who holds the sign in the front row of his class photo. I had weird interests, I wore glasses, I couldn't thow a ball from second base all the way to home plate. But, luckily, I was never bullied. Nothing more than the occasional snarl and shove that the alpha-males use to remind the betas just which is which. I escaped bullying, probably, because I had an age-appropriate sense of humor that I aimed often at myself, because I couldn't care less where I stood in the social heirarchy or how popular I was, and because my abilities in school and my bizarre interests somehow aroused more fascination than contempt in my fellow students. Maybe I was just inexplicably lucky.

But Billy hasn't been so lucky.

I try to imagine what it must be like to drag myself out of bed every morning and wonder if I'll be lucky enough to attract only sneers all day, or whether I'll actually be physically injured. What's it like to know that friendships are impossible, to realize that even if someone should improbably find you likeable, it would be social suicide for him to be your friend? To be a poor reader, and therefore treated as unteachable by your teachers, in addition to facing the daily contempt of the entire student body? What would give meaning to your life? How would you force yourself to go through the motions of living each day?

Is it any surprise that suicide rates are very high for kids in this age bracket? Would anyone be surprised to read a headline one of these days, announcing to a baffled world that a Fayetteville student had gone berserk and murdered his fellow students, before turning the gun on himself?

In 2007, Washington enacted a statute requiring school districts to adopt programs that are designed to combat "harassment, intimidation, or bullying." RCW 28A.300.285. (Enactment was delayed for a year because conservatives were afraid the statute might be used to prevent kids from freely expressing strong distaste for their gay classmates.) Fayetteville appears to have had a similar program in place. It obviously hasn't helped Billy. Legal compulsion can go only so far when the teachers themselves have no apparent interest in protecting their students.

But even with the best of laws and the most enlightened of faculty, kids will bully other kids, even in towns that don't seem particularly backward, so long as they grow up believing that such behavior is fun and acceptable.

In the 21st century, we're no longer animals. Our human pack is partly civilized. We only occasionally kill our pack's most vulnerable cubs. More often, we just make them wish they had never been born.