Of Bullies, Schoolyard Scuffles and the Fear of AK-47s

There’s a story about how 4-year-old Hillary Rodham came home crying because the kids in the family’s new neighborhood beat her up every time she went out to play. Her mother sent her back to brave the bullies, admonishing her, “There’s no room for cowards in this house.”

Wherever it is told, this anecdote about the first lady is applauded as evidence of a fearless spirit, if not a good solid right hook.

How would that story end today?

Two events--one in court, one at a bus stop--illuminate both how far we have advanced from that era, and how little.

At a school bus stop south of downtown Los Angeles this week, a couple of seventh-graders were quarreling, and one boy whacked the other with a thorny rose stem. At school, the nurse treated the wound. Police were summoned, and paramedics. The boy was hospitalized overnight for a “small but deep” wound in his lower back. Both boys have been suspended while authorities investigate. I expect the thorny stem has been locked away as evidence.

The next day, the mother of a 13-year-old Palmdale boy who died in a schoolyard fight last fall filed a $10-million wrongful-death suit against the principal and the school district.

Stephan Corson was killed when another student he had been fighting with punched him in the jaw and sent him chin-first into the sidewalk. The coroner has characterized the death as a homicide during an assault. The lawsuit charges the school and district with inadequately staffing the campus and supervising the students.

That Stephan was black and the other boy is white has become a factor in the case. But even that is set against a broader canvas of a thousand generations of a human pecking order that begins sorting itself out in childhood.

For a very long time, schoolyard survival skills have been regarded as a training ground for life’s hierarchies. Yet when every insult, every bloodied nose looks to have the makings of catastrophe, adults are asking not only whether they can let kids work it out among themselves any more, but whether they ever should have in the first place.

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From Flashman, the swaggering prep school bully of “Tom Brown’s School Days,” to present-day frat-boy hazings, every kid who ever lived gets a piece of it, and every adult recalls it with Kodak clarity.

Girls didn’t fight--the first big gender-divider--but the teasing was relentless. The only rule was to keep it to yourself. Name-calling, even throwing or taking a few punches was regarded as basic training. Don’t be a baby. Stick up for yourself. No one called for help, though some of us wanted to. The fear of losing face was greater than the fear of black eyes or a dose of mockery.

Now, when a kid might run home, not to mom but to the gun cabinet, the stakes are radically altered, which may explain what looks like overreaction in the rose-stem matter.

Not every schoolyard scuffle winds up as Stephan Corson’s did. Not every boot camp bullying ends with taps. Yet the not yet year-old scar of Columbine, and the fresher spectacle of a first-grader shot dead by another 6-year-old who was mad at her, pumps up the fears that every tetherball squabble can wind up in gunfire.

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Little more is known about the war of the rose stem.

But of the death of Stephan Corson, investigators concluded this:

It began, as these so often do, with the little stuff. It was the last class of the day on the last day of the week before Thanksgiving, and there was a substitute teacher. The 14-year-old began tossing spitballs. The sub scolded him and told him to clean them up. As the boy went to do so, Stephan tossed bits of paper on the floor and told him to pick them up, too. When the older boy refused, the two began arguing and Stephan declared he would settle the matter after class.

When class let out, Stephan went after the 14-year-old. As a teacher was trying to pry them apart, the 14-year-old delivered a last blow, knocking Stephan down. He died 40 minutes later.

A Little League field where Stephan played was named for him, and his number was retired. The 14-year-old was suspended, pending investigation. The Corson family, which disputes investigators’ accounts, wants him prosecuted.

A sheriff’s detective named Barry Wish concluded that the two were “good kids, not troublemakers . . . just fighting over something stupid, just two boys trying to prove their manhood.”

It falls to us, then, to teach the difference between manhood and adulthood--if we know it ourselves.

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Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for Al Martinez. Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.