The Fact Of Lance

These are not words that I want to write

In third grade I bullied a special ed kid named Lance Laprarie.  He was high functioning enough that he was in gen-pop but had special ed time when he had to go to some other place in the school.  I also had to go to some other place in the school for math tutoring so we were not so different.  But Lance was one of those kids who had obvious set-backs and this made him an easy target.  Kids picked on him all the time.

I had nothing at all against Lance.  Nothing!  I had been raised by two liberal and caring parents  To my knowledge, I had never been bullied myself and had stayed out of trouble as I was most painfully shy my whole young life.  But we had moved every year or two since I was old enough to recall.  That, coupled with my crippling timidness, made it impossible to fit in.  I was perpetually at or near the bottom of the social ladder and looking for some way to fit in.  I think about the young people I have known who embraced their weirdness and wore it like a proud banner, somehow emboldened by their own refusal to let differentness be a negative term.  They are the pioneers of my current self-image.  I am not like other people and it is my defining characteristic.  That of which I am most proud.  But to paraphrase S.E. Hinton...

This is now and that was then.

Now-  I find the flaws in  people and know that they have fought to better themselves ina long and introspective process that a popular kid could never be expected to undergo.  Introspection, there is no better word to describe what it means to go home and analyze a s****y day and ask what it is that I could have done to make it better.  Or, at least, less s****y.

Then-  I actively participated in 'behind the back' talk to dig a subterranean space for Lance so he couldn't even occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder.  Any thought at all would have told me that this was wrong, but it somehow made me part of the group for better or worse.  Looking back, for worse.

Now-  I collect broken people and fill them with a confidence that I have been granted by the mercy of companionship by the right kind of weirdos.

Then-  I saw an opportunity present itself.  An opportunity to raise my status with a single act.  It was in a fluid moment and so there was no time to analyze the short and long term effects.  This is the incredibly complicated and incredible simple nature of impulse.

Now-  I battle daily to let go of an instinctual struggle to control situations and defend ego.  The stream will lead you to the ocean, I say to myself in moments of introspection.  I have found my zen.  It is full of crassness and sarcasm but it is also tempered with a wish to let the world be as it is.  There are people all around us tearing eachother down to put themselves on some higher rung of a ladder that does not even exist!  The exhausting and perpetual effort it must take to constantly see others as rivals.  Meanwhile there are mountains of liars and cheaters and manipulators stacked up into the sky with nothing to support them but their own stupid imaginary system!

I am on the ground.  I am in the stream.  I am floating toward the sea.  There is no other destination, and there never has been.  I can have no effect upon the inhabitants of the imaginary ladder.  But one by one, the introspective and retrospective or unpopular or retarded fall from it and are in the stream with me.  Above, people mock us for our differentness.  We don't care.  We have our own system and it does not shuffle us higher or lower through our terrible acts.  I am speaking right now to my system.  We collect.  We support.

Then-  I hate myself for what I am about to tell you.  In that moment, that impulse, that un-erasable act, so simple that it may not even sound like a big deal to some, Lance, who sat directly in front of me, went to sit down.  I grabbed his chair and pulled it away.  He fell hard and all the way down, in just one more of what must have been countless humiliating moments in his young life.

The room exploded into laughter and our teacher pulled me out into the hallway and, in simpler terms, told me everything that this writing is about.  The ladder of status, the cruelty, the pointlessness and finally, the Fact of Lance.  I need not expand upon the obviousness of it. 

I was red-faced and deeply ashamed by my actions.  I am red-faced and deeply ashamed as I write these words.

The recess bell and I walked to the playground alone, as usual.  Then the most remarkable thing happened.  Some of the 'Cool Kids' approached me, seeing that I was distressed from the teacher's lecture.  They encouraged me and some even laid hands upon me.  Literally laid hands upon me, telling me how funny it was, what I did.

There I was, being exalted and lifted up the social ladder.  Anointed by the chosen ones.  They seemed to care about my feelings... but not at all about the main character of this story, who probably spent recess in the class that and every day for his own protection.  Who probably did not tell his parents about the incident out of a combination of humiliation and the hard fact that this degradation, this cruel and pointless act probably didn't even make the top 20 shittiest moments of his year.  Maybe not even the top 100.

And that is the Fact of Lance.

F**k me and f**k everybody for this!

I hope that some lower-rung kids saw what I did and saw its pointlessness and banded together to remove themselves from the ladder, and relish in their differentness and their ability to be introspective.

I hope this because it is the only short-term positive that I can imagine coming from it.