More light, please

When I was a kid, I got made fun of a lot. I’m sure most of you can relate to that, although the abuses vary from person to person; I had big lips for my face, so I got that thrown back at me (they called me “Nigger Lips” for a while, which is just so marvelous because it manages to be hurtful to anyone with a working brain), and there was this one asshole in elementary school, Wayne the Pain, who would slam me into a tree over and over, shouting, “Fuck the tree! Fuck the tree!” Good times. It got better when I hit high school, but it’s the sort of thing you never really get over- certain kind of people (ie, non-geeky straight guys) will always make me nervous, and I’ll always hear the worst in anonymous laughter.

My parents weren’t much help at the time. I can sympathize with their impotency now- it’s a near impossible situation, and I’m sure they did their best. But it made things doubly painful to spend the school day dodging assholes, only to come home to get a hug and a confused look, and not a whole lot more. Their big thing was that I should ignore it. Ignore the bullies, and the bullies will go away. Such is the message of parents ad nauseum, and the lesson to be learned from nearly every kid’s show ever made: bully’s get their power from you, so if you ignore them, they can’t hurt you.

I’d like to officially call bullshit on this. For one thing, it doesn’t work; if you were somehow able to achieve the near superhuman patience required to endure a week’s worth of taunting without reacting, you might succeed in getting them to move on, but kids with that sort of inner strength are few and far between. Which means that somehow, the taunting is now your fault, because you were too weak to let it slide; it’s your failing that let’s them get to you, in the fifth grade everyone should have the Zen-like balance to not be bothered by the contempt of your peers.

There’s been some talk lately that the lefty blogosphere (what a marvelously goofy word) is overreacting to the shrill rantings of sociopaths like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Ignore them and they’ll go away, some say. Initially, I agreed with that sentiment. Picking out the flaws in Coulter’s arguments seemed ludicrous. It’s like taking Mayor MacCheese to task over his poorly designed “Burgers For Everyone!” policy- Coulter doesn’t exist to speak truths, she exists to let other people believe the most horrible things they want to believe, to lend the credibility of the printed word to the dark windings of bigotry and contempt that seem to lay in the hearts of so many Americans. Of course what she says is a lie.

I still believe that (in the same way I believe that my name is Zack Handlen and I have blue eyes)(no one knows what it’s liiiiiiike), but I think I was wrong in believing she could be ignored. In a perfect world, she would be, but we don’t live a perfect world. We live in a world where bullies grow to positions of power without ever having learned anything so simple as basic human decency. Ann Coulter, and all her ilk, is a bully. You don’t ignore bullies. You face them down, and you tell them that they are an abomination and you will no longer tolerate their actions. Maybe you get beat up- although honestly, Ann, I’ve met Wayne the Pain, I’ve been brutalized by Wayne the Pain, and honey, you are no Wayne the Pain- but what matters is that you show them it doesn’t matter how loud they scream or how low they get, we’re not fooled. Change the nature of the argument, redefine the boundaries, alter the past, monopolize the present- it doesn’t matter.

Bullies are essentially brain dead vampires. So, more light, please.