Takes one to know one…

If children can be cruel, then teenagers are forged in the same fires as Satan himself… Kind of.

When the topic of school bullying comes up, I am always apt to say that most teenagers – even those who reckon themselves civil and sound – were bullies at one stage or another.

This blanket statement, which, at first, seems to be about the awfulness of adolescents, never fails to provoke a reaction.

If said in company, it inevitably offends the self-perceived moral infallibility of some nearby, incognito saint.

Without fail, this lifelong beacon of kindness and light hastes to remind me that one should be never extrapolate from the specific to the universal and assume their leap of logic a success.

“Just because you were a hateful wee tube, Emmet, does not mean that everyone else was,” they smirk.

At this point, I usually revert back to my old ways, beating the superiority out of them with a volley of vicious dead arms, before administering a scalp-tearing noogie. And then, just to make sure they don’t come back for more, I offload a completely confidence-shattering barrage of finely-crafted ‘your ma’ jokes.

“That’ll teach you to look down your nose at me you supercilious piece of self-righteous scum,” I laugh.

In all seriousness though, time tends to make people remember in black and white, predators and prey, bullies and victims. But my memory of secondary school is not so binary.

Just as I can recall the vulnerability of being outnumbered, belittled and threatened, I can still feel the pathetic power that comes with having somebody in a corner, back-footed, and without any substantial defence.

Though it was situations of the first kind that hurt more at the time, as the years go by, it is recollections of the latter that provide the more painful memories.

To remember the feeling of your metaphorical foot upon somebody’s throat is a rotten thing. Thankfully, though, my remembered history holds few incidents of this kind of abject, intentional, borderline-sadistic cruelty, and I have no doubt that many people can truthfully claim to be totally unafflicted by any shameful memories of this sort.

However, when I say that all teenagers were bullies at one stage or another, I am not talking about those who knowingly traded in the abject, intentional, and borderline sadistic kind of cruelty.

Rather, I mean those who partook in the mindless, sporadic, common cruelty that makes up so much of school life. Of this species of sin, I think few can claim to be clean.

Who did not refuse to let somebody less cool than themselves share a seat on the bus, for fear of how it might reflect on them?

Which of us can say we never laughed at somebody else’s expense, feeling protected and safe within the cackle of the pack.

And what person who ever ate their dinner in the town can truthfully claim to have never meticulously and persistently avoided some lonely guy or girl who wanted nothing more than to strike up a friendship?

In the distorted eye of the bully, each of these might be put down as a bit of craic, no big deal, or a necessary evil taken to ensure their own self-preservation.

However, though these lines of reasoning surely are not without substance, for the person who suffers, they suffer just the same.

It takes some serious moral strength and ethical integrity to refrain from being a bully at school at times. And I think far fewer people possess it than their schoolday memories would have them believe.