The horrific suicide of Amanda Todd – essentially, proxy murder by bullies – stirred an uncomfortable memory that still troubles the undersigned after 60 years.
Compared with the 14-year-old girl’s inching dance toward self-imposed death that nobody could stop, though so many around Amanda heard the evil music, the following recollection hardly registers.
But, no-fi or wi-fi, it had similar ingredients: The bullies, the targeted victim – without the defences that some have, some haven’t (perhaps not least the gift of making fun of the tormenters) – and those who stood by and did nothing.
It was 1952. The Korean War was on. That year the Royal Canadian Air Force, as it was called then and now again, operated a sort of training lite summer program for older high school students, locally through City of Hamilton 424 Squadron. It paid a handsome $100 a month, and you got to wear the uniform.
Speaking of then as now: then as now, I was a repressed show-off (not nearly repressed enough, some would say).
So each morning I marched with national pride and obligatory shining shoes and buttons to the last bus pickup spot for the Mount Hope base.
It had been the site of serious training for Commonwealth aircrew short years before. In fact our senior officers, Norman Shrive and Les Prince, were war veterans. (Our training wasn’t lax. We were whipped through our paces on the parade ground by a vet snarling: “I want to hear those arseholes snap!”)
The bus was already jammed with rowdy teenage boys, shouting and hooting. But not one. He sat at the back, smallish or shrunken by fear, and dark-faced – sallow. Apparently his name was Robin.
I deduced this from the lines of a song then undeservedly popular, as so many were in that largely musically sterile age, played by the deservedly forgotten Sammy Kaye.
This ditty was bellowed at an ear-splitting level by the youthful trainees, potential defenders of democracy against the Communist hordes, clashing at that very time in the Korean peninsula:
“Poor little robin, walkin’, walkin’, walkin’ to Missouri, he hasn’t got a …”
Can’t recall what the flightless robin didn’t have. A name, maybe. Nothing like Robin Robin.
On the surface, this incident would appear to be low on the bullying scale. But who’s to say?
There’s a one-of-the-gang carapace that shields some boys – then as now – from being bully-fodder. They aren’t chosen. Bullies have an evil genius for identifying damageable victims, something like bully Darwinism.
This sad youth was one of them. He might have let the foul air out of their balloon by wide-mouthed laughing, or by joining in the song. He didn’t.
None of the scores of boys on that bus came to his defence. Not an “Aw, lay off, you guys” was uttered.
It’s not an uncommon moral surrender. By coming to the aid of the bullied, one risks being bullied in turn.
The human being generally prefers to go along with the powerful. The passive majority in the crowd seems by definition a nullity, but in fact is the bully’s indispensable ally. He – not unusually she – loves an audience. Bullying is a kind of theatre.
The years have muddied whatever transpired. I suspect that after a few days this boy quit. The rest of his story? Did he give this a healthy heave-ho from his head?
The less-asked question is: Do those who remain silent get over the guilt of their silence?
Murderous bullying or low-level bullying, the three-cornered ethical map is the same. There are the bully, the bullied, the bystander. On that bus, I was a bystander. Coward. •
