From the Editor’s Desk: Bully (Premium)

My kids and I grew up in the same town, and we went to the same public school system. And yet our experiences couldn't have been more different.

The Dedham of today is far more diverse than the town I experienced as a child, in every way imaginable, and my kids are far more worldly and accepting of differences than I was at an early age. This benefitted my son, in particular, because of his hearing handicap: In my era, he would have been shunted off to a "skill center" and would have been a mysterious "them," and not one of us. But Mark was mainstreamed into a school system with kids who had all kinds of mental and physical handicaps, all of whom were simply accepted by their peers. Kids are great like that. Just give them the chance to experience diversity before their parents' biases poison their minds, and everything works out fine.

Tied to this, Mark never experienced the bullying that wasn't just common in my era, but was curiously just accepted as a fact of life. This kind of thing is both good and bad, honestly, as it's the gateway drug to the "everyone's a winner" mentality that pervades modern life. But it's good overall, of course. And I'm glad my son didn't have to experience the type of abuse he would have as a child had he been born a generation earlier.

I don't think much about the bullying that I experienced as a child, but when Steven and I recorded A Discussion on Neurodiversity recently, he discussed his own experiences in this regard briefly, and it all came flying back. And I realized that not only had bullying impacted me in interesting ways, but that I'd experienced bullying as an adult as well. And I've sadly done my fair share of bullying too.

The town I grew up in is about as suburban and normal as it can be, as it was when I was a kid. And were I to joke about "the mean streets of Dedham" with the friends I grew up with, it would result in immediate laughter. It's not like we had street gangs, stabbings, or any overt violence. Except, of course, that we did. And while most of the bullying I experienced was of the garden variety "skinny kid with glasses" type, a few incidents stand out. Including one involving a kid in my elementary school who was so troubled and violent that he ended up in jail---well, juvenile detention, or "juvie" as we called it---and never attended our high school.

An even more dramatic example occurred when I worked at a fast food restaurant on the Dedham/Boston border as a teenager. The store had a couple of "lifers," as we thought of them, young adults who worked there full-time and were older than my friends and me, but younger than the managers. Two of them, in particular, were scary individuals, and they liked to push the teenagers around, as bullies do. The most notable thing about them at the time was that one had a massive scar on his chest that was put there when the other one, his best friend, had stabbed him with a kitchen knife during an argument. How sweet.

I mo...