PUNCHING BULLIES IN THE NOSE

TEACHERS OFTEN ARE THE PROBLEM

I started as the smallest kid in the class so I was bullied.
A few years later, I had grown into one of the largest kids in the class and knocked out the bully who had once cut my cheek open with a sapling whip. We even became friends....but it took time.
Perhaps because of this evolution in my size and strength, I have a contempt for bullies but I also know you just have to stand up for yourself no matter the first bloody noses. Most importantly, you just never let anyone be bullied around you because it can spread like the flu. How can you live with yourself if you don't intervene when human jackals nip at the weak?
It occasionally had me walking a tightrope because it didn't help that I was often the biggest guy in the bar at closing time when pugnacious drunks were looking for victims. Obviously I am really dating myself because I am only 6' 2" and 250, and the newer generations are much larger than we used to be.
As proof, the other 11 on the high school football team, which had been dubbed Weston Ironmen by the sports pages because Coach Mel Thompson made us play 60 minutes without subs, were all smaller than me. And every one of us went on to play in the CFL or the NHL or on university teams.
Today this iron dozen would have to get by on speed rather than brawn, which certainly would have disqualified me.
But back to bullies which only flourish in high school if the teachers and the culture allow their evil flowering.
I went from a peaceful high school of around 250 students in Chesley to a comparative giant of Weston CVS with 1,500 drawn from families of the middle class and factory workers.
Students could be the offspring of doctors and managers and spot welders. They were going on to become dentists and truck drivers and teachers and clerks and Maple Leafs. There was an amiability among the students but I can't say the same for the teachers.
One punched me in the face when I kept insisting it was my cousin Bill Plewes who was talking and not me. Another insisted I had copied every last word in a Latin exam from another students. I then asked why I had got 66 and he had received 75 (which before mark inflation was considered honours.) He threw me out of the class.
(Ironically, I later became good friends with two major education directors who assured me that the two offending teachers were actually good guys and both had become principals.  I assured them on behalf of hundreds of students that we thought they were jerks.)
The tone of a school is set by the dominant teachers whether they be coaches or music directors or principals or advisers to the student council. I'm talking about all the schools I attended right up to Ryerson where I was the student president and the fights I had with the administrators were about  expulsions and drinking and not bullying.
What is said to have happened at St. Mike's would not have been tolerated by the students at any of these schools even if the administration ignored it. But then, back in my school days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the teams from St. Mikes were among the dirtiest teams in high school sports and friends who went there assured me it was a "tough" school. Obviously that culture continued.
I blame the coaches and teachers as well as the parents.
Especially the parents. You have to have a cruel streak running through all your actions if your children think it is O.K. to harass others with fists or broomsticks or soakings. Fortunately, among the many truths in the deserved best seller by Jordan Peterson in his assault on the politically correct ruining universities and democracy, he says that bullying lessens with age.
He writes in his 12 rules that "bullying at the sheer and often terrible intensity of the schoolyard rarely manifests itself in grown-up society."
Perhaps the intensity goes away but there is a pecking order in every family or group or office.  There is always someone who can be picked on. The "pecking" name comes from raising chickens, as I have. In  every flock, every bird knows who it can peck or be pecked by, and the unfortunate hen at the bottom of the order often ends up so bloodied that it dies or is killed first for dinner.
I am not nominating myself for father of the year but revulsion for bullying is among the things I passed on to my three sons along with a love of reading and a suspicion about vegetables.
It can be dangerous. Mark who lives in China has twice come to the aid of hapless men being beaten up and has come out OK, thank heavens, because he is burly and speaks Mandarin which helps with the police.
I was proud to find out years later than my son John Henry had stridently come to the defence of a girl from India - whose father was one of the best eye doctors around - who was being picked on because of her accent. He threatened anyone who didn't leave her alone.
We live across from that school, Sunnylea, and I remember a frantic classmate of Brett's running to our house at recess to say Brett and John Henry were fighting back to back against most of the boys from a higher grade.
Later, the smarmy principal tried false equivalency but I blew her amateur diplomacy sky high when I said that when 10 try to beat up two, it is obvious who is in the wrong and when administrators don't see that, the school board should move them along.
I hear stories all the time about schools being hamfisted in dealing with bullying and evil assaults and fighting, as if the teachers just hope it goes away without them having to notice.
Then one day it ends up on Page 1 and the evening news. So I blame the teachers and the administrators and the student body and the parents for not confronting it when it starts in a small way. And it always starts small, with the push and the taunts and then the slap and then the punch if the kids see they can get away with it. As did that bully who hit me with fists and then the whip until one day I knocked him down ... and out. (Winning takes some getting used to. I apologized for hitting him so hard.)
Bullies have to be confronted or they just keep going... and then they raise more bullies unless the teachers, and maybe even the police, say cut it out.