He might identify with a historical monster: Adolf Hitler, a tyrant who had total life-or-death control over millions, who could scare and terrorize people, and who could solve all his problems with guns and bombs.
He can fill his mind with Nazi mythology, wear a black shirt with a swastika, speak German in the halls and on his Web pages, and talk about whom he hates and whom he’d like to kill.
He can vent his rage with threats and obscenities on the Internet. The rantings of the Columbine killers are terrifying:
. . . for those of you who happen to know me and know that I respect you, may peace be with you and don’t be in my line of fire. For the rest of you, you all better hide in your houses because I’m coming for everyone soon, and I WILL be armed to the teeth and I WILL shoot to kill and I WILL KILL EVERYTHING!
. . . Dead people can’t do many things, like argue, whine, . . . complain, narc, rat out, criticize, or even talk. So that’s the only way to solve arguments with all you out there, I just kill. God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. I’ll just go to some downtown area in some big city and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame. I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will after I mow down a whole area full of you snotty, rich, high-strung, godlike-attitude-having worthless pieces of ____. I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can. . . .1
He can give in to the hate that grows out of his wounds and talk about a plan to attack his school so much, and for so long, that eventually, as James 1:14–15 warns, the thought becomes an act, and the act brings forth death.
Finally, on April 20, 1999, Hitler’s 110th birthday, he can carry out his most gruesome fantasy. And what better place than the school, where everyone, from the parents and teachers on down, has all the power, and he doesn’t? What better place than in the high-school cafeteria, where students once surrounded Eric and Dylan and squirted ketchup packets all over them, laughing at them and calling them faggots while teachers watched and did nothing?2
And he can leave behind an e-mailed suicide note to the police (allegedly written by Eric Harris):
. . . Your children, who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me, who have treated me like I am not worth their time, are dead. THEY ARE ________ DEAD. Surely you will try to blame it on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, or the way I choose to present myself— but no. Do not hide behind my choices. You need to face the fact that this comes as a result of YOUR CHOICES. Parents and Teachers, YOU [fouled] UP. You have taught these kids to be gears and sheep. To think and act like those who came before them, to not accept what is different. YOU ARE IN THE WRONG. I may have taken their lives and my own—but it was your doing. Teachers, Parents, LET THIS MASSACRE BE ON YOUR SHOULDERS UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE. . . .3
Everyone has his or her own theory. Here is mine: Simply put, I believe that what happened at Columbine was the result of a wounded spirit.
Although the authorship of the above suicide note is in question, as are many details surrounding that day, to me, in the overarching scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. Whoever wrote it pegged the problem. We now have in our society myriad young people and adults who have been deeply wounded by the demeaning words or actions of authority figures or peers.
It is no secret that kids on the fringes of the cool crowd of Columbine endured their share of taunts and abuse. They were called faggots, were bashed into lockers, and had rocks thrown at them. They were shoved, pelted with pop cans or cups of sticky soda, splattered with mashed potatoes and ketchup, even sideswiped by cars while they rode their bikes to or from school.
One anonymous teen spoke of waking on school days with a knot in his stomach and the dread of having to face more humiliation at school. He would avoid certain hallways and even make his way to classes outside the school building to escape being ridiculed or bashed against lockers.4He knew Harris and Klebold were being tormented as well, and he said, “I’m not saying what they did was OK, but I know what it’s like to be cornered, pushed day after day. Tell people that we were harassed and that sometimes it was impossible to take. Tell people that . . . eventually, someone was going to snap.”5
I know how that feels. Maybe you do too.
Why is it so important that we address the problem of bullying and other demeaning attitudes and behaviors in our society? Because one in four bullies will end up in the criminal correction system.6 Because those who have been wounded often become those who wound others. Because we could be allowing the creation of more monsters—the kind you never see, never expect, until they snap and take desperate, violent measures. And all of us—those who have been wounded as well as those who wound others— need healing, forgiveness, and a new heart attitude toward our fellow human beings.
No longer can we hide our heads in the sand and pretend that atrocities such as Columbine don’t happen in our backyard. No longer can we live in denial, pretending that abuse does not occur in our family, church, or workplace.
It’s time for change.
FINDING A VOICE
Chapter Five
Long before I became a published author, I was a public speaker. I spoke at youth rallies, retreats, Bible camps, church banquets, you name it. I did Bible studies, lectured on Christian world-view, preached the gospel, told wacky stories, delivered sermons, and covered all manner of subjects—all, that is, except the subject of this book.
I guess it seemed just a little too esoteric, too narrow in scope. After all, to my knowledge, I had never heard anyone stand before an audience and address the matter of boys, girls, men, and women demeaning each other, picking on other people needlessly, and treating each other with abject disrespect. Nobody talked about it in a public forum—not parents, teachers, preachers, or college professors.
Sure, we’ve all heard the subject of bullying mentioned once in a while, usually treated as an unpleasant nuisance, a rite of passage that happens to everyone, no big deal. But I’d never heard anyone actually preach on it. I’d never heard anyone come out and say that bullying is wrong. I had to wonder, If no one else considers it important enough to talk about, how can I be sure any audience will think it important enough to hear about? Though it was a significant burden I had harbored secretly for most of my life, I never seemed to find the right reason, place, and time to talk about it.
But then came the Life on the Edge conference for youth and their parents in Ontario, California, on Saturday afternoon, May 22, 1999. Focus on the Family sponsored the event, and I was scheduled to be one of the speakers during that weekend. I’d done LOTE conferences before and had some prepared messages in my files already, but things changed after the killings at Littleton. The more I read and heard about that whole tragedy, the more I felt a quaking and stirring in my spirit, as if God were saying, Frank, here is your reason and your place, and yes, it’s time to talk about it.
You may have heard the talk broadcast on the Focus on the Family radio program. When I first delivered it in Ontario, I was almost afraid I’d flopped, that I had failed to get my message across to the audience. As I presented the speech, I was way outside my comfort zone and choked with emotion half the time, being completely vulnerable about my experience. I told no jokes. I did no humorous routines as I normally do. I simply stood on the platform and shared from my heart. Nervous, and with little confidence in my memory, I leaned over my notes, even reading aloud from them at times. I rarely strayed from the podium, gesturing and moving around as little as possible while I spoke. I agonized through every word of the talk.
The audience of fifty-five hundred teens and their parents were respectful and receptive; they even applauded at times, but, for the most part, they remained still, subdued, and strangely quiet during my presentation.
Afterward, I came to understand why. This wasn’t a talk an audience could enjoy, applaud, and then yak about as they left the auditorium. This was a deep d
igger, a grave opener that scraped off layers of dirt revealing issues that had been buried long ago but were not really dead. For many in the room, my message was a painful reminder of past hurts and a call for reflection. For others, it was the emotional equivalent of a dentist drilling through a live nerve.
It’s not a light and simple matter to open up and admit you’re still harboring wounds from your childhood or to admit that, when you were a kid, you were bullied or abused or that you were the bully in someone else’s life, the cause of the hurt. It’s difficult to admit that you are being bullied or that you are the bully right now.
Heavy stuff. No wonder the audience responded in self-conscious silence.
Following my speech, the first feedback I received was from the sound technicians backstage. Of all people! These guys were adults, professionals, employees of Focus on the Family. They appeared to have perfectly normal, grown-up exteriors, all decked out with their Life on the Edge T-shirts and walkie-talkies. Nobody would have guessed that they had lived for years with a wounded spirit, with memories of sorrow, abuse, and loneliness, of being pariahs at their schools, on the job, or in their families. But they hadn’t forgotten what those wounds felt like, and now, having heard me broach the subject and admit that the faces of my oppressors still haunted my memories, these adults felt free to talk about the ghosts from their pasts.
Later, I sat down with a charming couple, a drama duo who presented some remarkable parables and skits during the conference. They too had a story to tell about demeaning experiences in their pasts, and the similarities were disturbing and comforting; disturbing because the problem is so universal, but comforting because we could share so freely from a common experience.
After I got back home, I heard from the organizers of the event. No, I hadn’t flopped as I had feared. Actually, I’d hit a nerve.
Dr. James Dobson heard a tape of my talk while exercising on the treadmill one morning, and it touched him so deeply he took his wife, Shirley, out for a drive that evening, and they listened to the tape again in the car. They agreed they had to share it with the Focus on the Family radio audience.
The opening words of the broadcast are worth recounting. First came the telephone voice of an anonymous woman: “I was one of those kids who at one time in my life was mean to everybody else. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. Please forgive me and forgive everybody else, because nobody deserves all that.”
Then Mike Trout, Dr. Dobson’s radio cohost, gave a warm and evocative introduction: “Did you ever pick on someone? Tease him or her for whatever reason? Well, of course, you did. Unfortunately, it’s an event that happens far too often, and I’d go as far as to say you remember at least one occasion when you were made fun of too. Those memories are etched in our brains, and each occasion, each offense is an ingredient in the recipe that has come together over the years to create who we are today.”
The recording of my talk followed, and I don’t know what sort of response Focus on the Family anticipated, but I had no idea how vast an audience would identify with those words. After the talk was broadcast in October 1999, Focus on the Family received 3,375 telephone calls. When the same program was rebroadcast in December 1999, Focus received 1,264 calls. At least 316 callers requested tapes after the first broadcast and 1,117 callers requested tapes following the rebroadcast. The folks at Focus informed my publisher that these numbers are much higher than the usual response to a broadcast. Ordinarily, a response by one thousand callers is considered good; two thousand callers is beyond the best expectations. When three thousand calls come in, they know they’ve touched a nerve.
Now, I’m a writer with a name and an audience, so I wrote this book, but I realize that my story is nothing exceptional, that the wounds inflicted on me are marginal compared to those who have suffered severe child abuse, spousal abuse, verbal, sexual, or emotional abuse. My pain pales in comparison to that endured by the brave men and women who survived Hitler’s concentration camps. When I think about the victims and families involved in the senseless murders of those who died in Littleton, Colorado, or the students who were shot to death in Paducah, Kentucky, or the tortures that many people have overcome in their personal lives, I’m embarrassed even to mention the bullying I experienced.
But we do have an issue here, don’t we? I’m only one small voice in a sea of voices, and our issue is more than just a simple case of teasing. While we can all accept that bullying and abuse betray a lack or loss of respect for other human beings, there is a deeper issue: the devaluing of human life; and that in turn indicates a lack or loss of respect for the Giver of human life and dignity, God Himself. The message a bully sends is a mockery of God’s handiwork, a lie that slanders God’s nature and negates His love for us.
This could be important, don’t you think?
Consider, for example, how such behavior can distort our view of God. In their book The Sacred Romance, authors Brent Curtis and John Eldredge describe the awful feelings of doubt and despair following the piercing of our heart by an offender’s “arrow”:
The terror we enter and the seeming lack of rescue from it leave us with a deeply imprinted question about God that we hide in our heart, sometimes not allowing the light of day to touch it for years, even deep into our spiritual journey. We cover the question with rationalizations that let him off the hook and allow us to still believe, but our beliefs rest on foundations that move and quake under us. It is easy to reason that Jimmy and those sixth graders were just bad; you know, “not raised in very good homes.” And of course, our rationalizations do bear a modicum of truth that keeps us from dealing with the question lodged deep in our heart, hidden from our conscious mind: “Do you care for me, God?”1
Curtis and Eldredge go on to trace some of our misgivings about God to our childhood experiences, including the infliction of wounds by others. See if you can relate to any of these: “Parents who were emotionally absent; bedtimes without words or hugs; ears that were too big and noses that were too small; others chosen for playground games while we were not; and prayers about all these things seemingly met with silence.”2
Ever been there? I’m beginning to find out that many people can strongly relate to these issues, more than we’ve ever imagined. It brings an interesting, television-like image to my mind: I see myself walking along in the center of a vast room, sort of like those all-white, cornerless sound stages you see in a television studio. For a moment, I think I’m the only one with a story to tell about childhood wounds that still hurt, but then, from one side, a sound technician comes along, an amicable guy wearing a Life on the Edge T-shirt, carrying a walkie-talkie. He was the pariah of his class. He knows what I’m talking about. So we walk together.
Then comes a stage technician for Life on the Edge. And then the drama team that performed, and then a lady, a friend and listener of Focus on the Family who could hardly listen to the broadcast because it reminded her of the deeply buried pain from her past.
Then more people walk in from the sides and seemingly pop up out of nowhere, all shapes, all sizes, and all walks of life:
I see a columnist for a major Midwestern newspaper who once interviewed me. He’s in his sixties now, and he has polio, so he walks with the aid of crutches. He’s needed the crutches most of his life, but he’s used to that. What really pains him are the wounds he can still feel, delivered by the kids who taunted him when he was a child.
Ah, here’s the middle-aged woman who refuses to sing, even though she has a perfectly good voice and plenty of latent talent. She can remember the very day, during music appreciation class in the sixth grade, when she stopped singing. The other kids laughed at her and told her she sounded like a bird. Humiliated, she closed her mouth and has never opened it again to sing.
Here comes a beautiful, well-known screen actress. Nobody would guess that she had to wear a body cast for four years during her childhood. She was treated so cruelly by her classmates that she dropped out of school
in the tenth grade and spent her teenage years as a loner, often hiding away in her bedroom with the door shut. Years later, after she had established a relationship with Jesus Christ, she was finally able to accept herself and to forgive those who had hurt her.
Please don’t stare at that young man who is so excited about counting, “One . . . two, three . . . four, five, six, seven, eh-aa . . . eight . . . nine, TEN!” For him, this simple act is a major accomplishment, the opening of an immense door in his life. His father always told him he was so stupid he’d never be able to count to ten.
And along comes Shawn, the boy with the stutter and the harelip. He gave up learning to read because his schoolmates laughed and mimicked his attempts. He’s thirty-seven now, and he still can’t read.
“Hi, Joseph! Good to see you.” Joseph has one leg that is shorter than the other, severely impairing his ability to run. He might have done well at any sport that didn’t require him to run fast, but his gym teacher never told him that; the drill-sergeant-style teacher simply knocked points off Joseph’s grade and mocked him, calling him “Slow Susie.” Joseph didn’t bother with any kind of physical fitness until well into his forties.
Meet Linda. She was excited about attending college until the very first day of classes, when a couple of senior girls insulted and belittled her for no reason other than the fact that she was a freshman. The upperclassmen didn’t know her; they didn’t even ask her name. Linda had been stung and hurt enough, all through junior and senior high school. She was not about to subject herself to that sort of treatment all over again. She walked off the campus and never returned, and, to this day, she’s never obtained the college education she once dreamed of.
I look around at the growing crowd. Some people in our group are overweight. Some are small and weak. Some have physical deformities, cerebral palsy, or Down syndrome, or scars from burns. Others are Asian, African, Native American, racially mixed. It’s not too hard to guess what their stories might be.
No More Bullies Page 5
