Hate: My Personal Origins

A continuation of my essays on hate, this time focusing on how I learned to hate with every iota of my being when I was young. As I’ve grown older, it has become apparent that nurture overwhelms nature to a great degree and looking back at how being bullied changed me I can see that now. Why? Because one can change back after being changed…

I was a cheerful, happy kid who got criticized for talking too much in my early years. The world was so fascinating and a source of constant wonder, so I wanted to share that with others. Born into a family where my siblings were half-brothers sixteen and twenty years older respectively, that meant I was dealing with adults full time and they don’t like to hear from kids. They were also more concerned with extending their adolescence or reliving it, so that had something to do with it.

To be clear, I was never beaten, abused, or mistreated. Instead I was pretty much left to do whatever I wanted -- which could have been disastrous. Fortunately for my parents, I was a relentlessly good kid enamored of heroes and acts of valor. Sadly, I never had the kind of health or physical strength to do much with those impulses.

In a bid to escape the declining conditions of the city of Indianapolis, the family moved out to rural Minnesota to rent a farm house. Having fallen in with the local hippies while still not being hippies themselves, life consisted of hand to mouth scrabbling and partying when not scrabbling. I grew up with the hippie kids who were never spanked or disciplined and they were a rowdy lot. Everything they wanted to do was bad, so I found myself more in the company of adults.

Frankly, everything they wanted to do was bad too, but I didn’t understand most of it at the time. So even early I wasn’t fitting in with my “peer group” such as it was. But it didn’t phase me and I enjoyed life especially when being used by my brothers as bait for pretty college age girls.

I think I got more attention than they did, however. Lots of free sodas, quarters for pinball machines, and an early awakening of amorous desire toward the opposite sex was the end result. So much fun, but it couldn’t last.

My dealing with my own age group really began with kindergarten. It was quite a disappointment for me and I came back after the first day upset that they hadn’t taught me to read. Really, that’s something my parents or brothers should have done, but I was always left to my own devices.

Kindergarten was the first time I got into trouble with authority. The cause? Reading when I was supposed to be napping. I fell head over heels in love with books then and dinosaur books really grabbed my attention. My teacher was not nice about it in the least and little did I know that it would foreshadow one of the bitterest memories of my life years later.

I also started crushing on girls at that time. Of course that was futile, but aren’t most crushes? Still, it set me apart a little and I also found that dealing with the town kids was like talking to aliens. Strangely, the cool kids had already been decided at this early age and a pecking order begun. Not being related to anyone in the area, I was considered an outsider right off the bat.

Still, it wasn’t anything horrible and by the time I attended 1st grade it was in a different state. Iowa was a strange experience, but not a bad one for the most part. We moved to a very German town with a school that was run with ruthless efficiency and order. In other words, the polar opposite of what I’d experienced so far. The precision timing of the school buses rolling in and out was absolutely amazing. If I’d had a watch, I could have set it them.

This strict order caused me problems at school for talking in class, usually for helping someone out with math or reading. I spent more than one recess forces to sit in the classroom with a paper towel stuck in my mouth. Back then they were the brown ones with the wood chips still visible in them. Soap would have tasted better.

It was also time to take Iowa Basics aptitude tests and I surprisingly tested out at 99% despite my learning to read late. Yes, if your kid has no reading skills by kindergarten, they are behind and most will stay behind.

Despite growing health problems that included a diagnosis of asthma (though inhalers did absolutely nothing for me) and hospitalization for pneumonia, I managed to make a few friends. That was the beginning of a constant struggle with my health and perpetually making up for missed tests, homework, etc. which would eventually separate me from my “peers” over time.

Other than being treated like a hopeless freak by the teachers in that small town in Iowa, life for me was happy. It was not for my parents and I found myself starting 3rd grade in the school I’d gone to kindergarten. So began my descent into a very personal hell.

Coming back after being gone for two years meant that groups of friends had solidified into iron cliques and that I was even more of an outsider than before. I did restart a couple of friendships, but it wasn’t quite the same. My poor health also resulted in me being a lot smaller and weaker than the other kids. In a small rural town, that made you an object of ridicule.

What happened didn’t occur overnight and wasn’t like the flipping of a switch, instead it was a gradual alienation where I slowly was separated from the herd. Those early years of being back in the area weren’t so bad. I can hardly remember much bullying other than being bullied by older students who liked tossing younger ones around or randomly slugging them in the gut.

I suppose I should explain the environment of the specific small town more. If it were to be likened to a literary setting, it would be Lord of the Flies rather than Lake Wobegone. Lots of running around, getting in trouble, fights, backstabbing, and completely out of control behavior. That was just the parents, the children were even worse. I knew some who were drinking before elementary school ended.

It was a town filled with hypocrisy, social maneuvering, perpetual adolescent rebellion, and the 1970s. What few charms it had were superficial and fleeting. In short, it was highly educational to anyone paying attention and I was. Sadly, most people were not and only concerned with their personal dramas, usually of their own making.

Consequently, the kids were an undisciplined (except for the ones viciously beaten by their fathers) and amoral bunch. Fights after school were common and consisted of a large circle gathered around the two combatants to make sure that blood was spilled and the weaker of the two didn’t run away. This applied to the girls and boys alike, though the girl fights were rarer and much uglier.

I learned to avoid such situations since as the years went by I became more of a target. What were my sins? Hard to tell, but I had some guesses.

I wasn’t related to anyone and since it wasn’t unusual to be a cousin twice over only removed a little, it made me a perpetual foreigner. I was small and physically weak to the point of having once been flipped head over feet by a point blank shot in gym class dodgeball. This was not good in an environment of might making right.

But there was one stand out characteristic that made me a target: my intelligence. I’ll be exceedingly blunt, the kids in that school were not above average but rather stupid. Test scores were not kept private and I made the fatal mistake of being eager to give answers in class. By the time elementary school was ending I was a marked man. I wasn’t into sports, I didn’t have a favorite brand of beer (yes, this was a necessity), and I read books for fun. The family didn’t have a lot of money and it was rare that I could go to the local movie theater, so I didn’t have much pop culture to discuss with them.

By this point my class had reached that special status of being “the worst class we’ve ever seen” at the school. One memorable day a substitute teacher came in and made the mistake of looking week. Like a hungry school of piranhas, my classmates pounced on the poor woman. By the afternoon, she was gone having suffered a nervous breakdown. My classmates were rather proud of themselves, but I’m still haunted by her calling me and one other over to thank us for being the only good kids in the room just before leaving.

At the time, the abuse from my classmates had escalated from the verbal to the physical. Because I’d been taught at home and at school that fighting is never the correct option, I didn’t defend myself. It wouldn’t have done any good, I thought, plus there were threats of it getting worse if I said anything.

It still got worse and sadistically inventive. Thumbtacks in my chair turned into thumbtacks being driven into my back while the teacher was lecturing. The occasional punch in the gut turned into bending my arm behind my back and twisting it. One time that was so bad I couldn’t use the arm for a day and a half. When my mother found out about it and complained to the school, nothing was done.

The bullying didn’t take place while the teachers were out of the classroom. These things happened while they were there, so I have to think they knew what was going on to some degree. They may have been too frightened of the kids for all I know. Only one classroom was safe and that was the one where an ex-marine taught and he was strong believer in corporal punishment. I loved that man; he was smart, observant, and a great teacher.

So I belonged to a notorious class of hooligans unlike any the small town school had witnessed before. One year, this particular class was in the hands of a teacher who was regarded as a saint in the community. Very openly charitable, having adopted a disabled child and sent another to die in the Peace Corps in Africa, she was considered a paragon of virtue. She was also my kindergarten teacher.

One day after making the mistake of answering a question extensively, she rounded on me and berated me in front of the class. I was guilty of making everyone else feel inferior and had hurt their feelings. She got one student to stand up and continued on how I was no better than kids from farms…

I was in shock by that point. Here I had been doing my best to keep my head low to survive and now I was the villain? She continued with the lecture on how I shouldn’t look down on my classmates. It was insane. It took every ounce of will just to get through a day the way I was treated and I’m the evil doer persecuting my innocent classmates?

It crushed me completely. If teachers couldn’t be trusted to know what’s right and wrong, who could? At that point, I felt helpless and couldn’t even begin to defend myself.

In the days to come things got worse. My classmates took this as permission to run me down openly and they did. Then the other teachers started in on me.

I recall being asked to complete some math that a teacher started on a chalkboard. The problem wasn’t that difficult, but the teacher had messed up the first part of it. When I corrected that I got some harsh words from the person supposed to be educating us. He wouldn’t admit it was wrong, though one of the other classmates verified it was. We moved on to the next problem.

Despair quickly set in and it fanned an already glowing ember of pure rage. I learned to hate from my classmates and teachers at the school. Don’t question authority, obey and go with the flow, or there will be harsh consequences. Especially if you are the most rule abiding, honest, and well intentioned person there.

My inward retreat from those so called peers increased at a rapid pace. By the time junior high was underway, I’d lost the last of my friends from early elementary school days. Oh he was still there, but he’d joined the pack. The way I found that out was novel.

He attacked me in the boy’s restroom.

I walked into an ambush between classes and he blindsided me with the first punch. He continued hitting me as I tried to ask him why he was doing it, but most of the other boys in my class were there egging him on with huge smiles on their faces. Putting up no fight I walked out of there slowly while he kept hitting me.

I was so stunned by this that I didn’t physically feel the punches, though I suspect his heart wasn’t really in it. Being a big farm boy, he should have been able to lay me out with one hit.

Heartbreaking is an abstract word until you actually experience it. I can’t recall anything before this event reaching its levels, so this was when I learned what it meant. I knew I was totally alone in a world that hated me, so decided to hate it back. Yet I hated myself even more, because a good person couldn’t deserve such treatment. There had to be something very wrong with me.

There was at least one other student I got friendly with around that time, but we weren’t what I’d call the best of friends. But he never ran me down and we had fun at lunch. But I didn’t trust him. Or anyone else for that matter. People were liars, backstabbers, abusers, hypocrites, and mean spirited.

What made it all ridiculous is that the perpetrators of the bullying would always be nice to me if we were one on one and not observed by others. This perverse behavior confused me and made things worse, not better. It was infuriating and taught me that mob behavior isn’t just theoretical. People really do develop a hive mind mentality.

It all came to a head one day in the high school art room that we junior high students shared. The teacher was a friend of my mother’s and the room was rather large. That made it easy to conceal abuse when she was at the other end of room. I was sitting working on some meaningless art assignment when a group of the students clustered around to see if they could get a rise out of me with insults.

I studiously ignored them while seething inside, but noticed one of the girls who’d been a friend back in the kindergarten era approaching. This wasn’t good, because at some point years earlier she had gone through an abrupt and radical personality transformation. She was the source of nearly all female related violence in the class and was one very angry person.

What she said as she hit me in the back of the head I can’t recall. There was that initial flash of surprising pain and then everything went white. There was no sound, no sensation, only white blankness filling my vision.

It eventually cleared to reveal one of the burlier male students beginning to turn purple from someone strangling him. Oddly enough, the hands gripping his throat seemed to be attached to my arms. I immediately released him and took a step back. We were halfway across the length of the art room and the rest of the class was gathered into one end with looks of fear on their faces.

They had to have been stunned. Me, I couldn’t comprehend what had just happened. The class was near the end of the day, so I was allowed to leave early. I never received discipline for the incident thanks to my mother’s friend not reporting it.

Word did get around the students. I never had any physical bullying after that and even the rare verbal insult was done at a careful distance. At least one of the boys thought it was awesome because it apparently looked like something out of The Incredible Hulk television show popular at the time.

I learned just how dangerous hate was that day and it scared me deeply. While my body moved and acted, what made me a person wasn’t. That was something I never wanted to experience again and the “what if” of killing someone weighed heavily on my conscience.

Two lessons were learned from the berserker like rage erupting.

The first was that you have to fight back if you are bullied. The pacifism junk taught by society is a lie and will only encourage more abuse which leads to an even more damaged soul. This is simple reality.

The second was that hate had a grip on my soul that I wanted to be free of. It was all consuming, dominating my thoughts and dictating nearly every move I made. Oh how I wanted my classmates dead. It was never a fantasy of killing them directly, but refusing to help or save them if they were in mortal danger. Well, maybe giving the car dangling over a cliff a push was a bit more proactive than it should have been.

I had no clue where to begin, but we were going to move to Indianapolis in the summer. Anywhere had to better than where I was.

But that is a story for another time. A clue may be found in that as I wrote this while being quite ill (makes emotions more intense) I didn’t feel a shred of that hate I once had.

I do feel regret.

There was a girl in the class who wasn’t particularly bright, was plain, and had led a sheltered existence at home. Often she was a target of bullying by the girls. Not once did I step in to defend her since I was so busy trying to keep a low profile.

That memory still hurts, unlike the others.