“Outraged Dad Storms Daughter’s Bus, Confronts Bullies”

As they sum up the news stories of 2010, Outraged Dad Storms Daughter’s Bus (first came out in Sept – note the comment from a parent who gave his child a sock filled with quarters!) makes top 10 for 2010 here. Child with cerebral palsy taunted relentlessly. The disabled girl is hospitalized from stress.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pvsVHdepsw]

Her dad confronts the bullies, uses rough language, gets arrested (later released on bail.) The bullies didn’t even seem intimidated at all in the video and you can hear them laughing at the end – and the dad of the disabled child gets into trouble? Are you freaking kidding me?

I wonder how the bullies’ parents feel about their kids picking on a disabled child. Just watched the news channel interview and commend the disabled girl’s dad. Goodie.

Two decades ago as a tween, and then again as a 17 year old in the top class of one of the (then) best academically performing secondary schools in our (then) hometown, I… kinda got bullied.

“You have no breasts and no butt. Nothing.” I also made some kind of gossip book a-la Mean Girls – I was apparently sleeping around. “Aileen’s my friend. She told me.” Especially ironic since I lost my virginity at age 27 when I got married.

Bullying of any sort is a real pet peeve for me. I view bully retribution as a form of natural selection – retribution should make bullies extinct. It is for the benefit of our species.

My mother was a teacher in the school during one of the periods I got picked on (but avoided teaching my class). She was also the one who came across what was said about me in confiscated Mean Girls gossip book. She never told me what else was in there.

I requested to change seats in class.

When the teachers weren’t around, my “friends” still sauntered over to my new seat.

When the brains behind “No breasts no butt” was called in to the principal’s office, she played the “race” card: “I’m the only one called in because I’m the only one of a different race.” The school didn’t dare touch her. I think they might have tried to tell her parents, but I’m not sure. At some stage, our dads were introduced to each other.

The bullying stopped thanks to my father. “Please, please don’t misunderstand that this is by any means a threat,” he began carefully. While I was essentially easy going he went on, “Everyone has their limit, and they’re all still kids.” I was practicing breaking inch-thick boards with my forearms at the time (usually not fists – I have very thin wrists and besides I needed my fingers for piano), he explained.

Overheard as we left, “Why would you choose to pick on someone who’s training for a black belt?”

I wondered – if her dad could have called her off that easily, why didn’t he do anything before my dad mentioned the black belt? Or had he not known to what extent his daughter was making my life miserable?

Smart kids know how to be particularly cruel. And infinitely more creative in not getting caught. Bully retribution is therefore a real necessity. Otherwise they grow into smart adults who haven’t grown up. Even more capacity for mischief, ever better at avoiding censure, never learning it was never the right thing to do in the first place.

After all, they got the grades in school.

Good grades – or for that matter any other achievement – should not be a license to treat other people badly. Yet it’s a lesson many top students I would come across have skipped.

And then there was A – we had been classmates several years prior, but after the SRP streaming exam she had gone to a different class. She sat outside the principal’s office waiting for me that day, skipping “important lessons” in class just so she could be there when I emerged. No “friend” of mine that I know of in my own “top class” would ever have thought to cut class so she could be a friend to someone.

A and I hadn’t been classmates for almost 2 years. I was desperate to fit in and be accepted among the “top students,” after the streaming, and though we remained friends, we hung out in different circles. My friendship with A had been discouraged because in a fairly “good” school, she was a black sheep. The mean girls on the other hand, were the “right kind of friends” my dad initially strongly encouraged me to hang out with (until this thing happened). A invited me to hang out with her circle.

That day my mum (who taught A’s class) walked by and saw her sitting outside waiting for me.

“Don’t you have class?”

<grin> “Yup”

My mum smiled. Then she kept on walking.

“A” was not a “desirable student,” from the top class, like my bullies were. But she was a much better person. (And btw like the bully, she is of a different race than me too)

And as for bullies and retribution, it would seem that’s a grey area – supposedly “two wrongs don’t make a right,” we’re supposed to teach our kids to be better than that. On the other hand, it is a language bullies often don’t understand. Even the best collegiate debater is limited to the language he/she speaks.

When it comes to our children, how many of us are willing to even try to teach bullies our language, when we can so easily revert to the “quarters in a sock-speak” that they understand?

Kids have to be protected from grownups, this is the world we live in today… So who’s going to protect our kids from other kids?

Golden Gate Park is the largest outdoor playground Rockstar’s ever been in… And the only people filming their children are us and another set of parents speaking in Cantonese. A Caucasian dad pulls a face at my iPhone, and at one point walks behind me to see exactly whose child is on my screen in the crowded playground. Food for thought – wouldn’t have crossed my mind but for the sign Kings is happily posing next to in the first pic.

Even as our own Rockstar appears out of Giant Child Dispenser.

Rockstar makes friends with a very well-mannered 4 1/2 year old who is bilingual in French and English. “Does he learn Chinese?” Arthur’s mum wants to know. They live nearby this park, which his mum tells me is also near a French school that her son attends.

“Some of Arthur’s cousins have been exposed to 4 or 5 languages… But for me two are enough, I wanted him to start speaking earlier.” The whole time she’s speaking to Arthur in French, and he’s speaking to Rockstar in perfect, very eloquent English.

But when Kings returns with an ice cream cone for Rockstar, Arthur’s mum quickly runs distraction. They leave for a nearby merry-go-round ride. (Rockstar’s different, he doesn’t get hooked on sweet things)

Kings drove me an hour out of Seremban to visit A last year when she was heavily pregnant with her second child. She graduated from university, holds down a pretty good job, married a great guy whom she raises a boy and girl with in a double-storey semi-detached house.

So much for being a “problem student” in our school.

A decade later, I received a letter and later an email apology from one of my bullies. A gesture that gets full marks for its sincerity – I changed addresses several times, wasn’t that easy to find me for some years.