Looking for a Scapegoat: The Elusive School Bully

Now that the term bully has embedded itself in the national lexicon, we need some sort of definition to determine just who is and who isn’t one. I have begun a modest search.

We know, for instance, that Hitler, Attila the Hun, Stalin and others of notable cruelties were classic bullies, but we aren’t talking here about men who have left bloody imprints on world history.

We’re talking about local bullies, bullies-in-the-news, the common, garden-variety schoolyard bully. He’s the guy who physically or emotionally pushes a kid around for a good laugh, for his own twisted satisfaction or for the cheers of his peers.

He’s the good old American bully.

In the last few years, his ignoble activities have resulted in death and recrimination. Victims of bullies have grabbed their daddies’ guns and gone marching back to their schoolyards to teach their antagonists, and maybe a few others, a thing or two. Not good.

Blood as red as ribbons has flowed down the hallways and on the grounds of schools across the country, and this has alerted us not to the danger of guns, bad parenting or a slow decline of moral values, but to a greater danger. We know what’s causing all the problems.

It’s those damned bullies.

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I began my somewhat limited search for bullies between the shootings at Santana and Granite Hills high schools. You know the details of the incidents, so I’m not going to dwell on the grief and horror caused by specific barrages of gunfire.

Both involved bullies or bullying in one form or another, which fed the passions of those looking for someone to blame. We crave the kind of simple, sound-bite solutions that allow us to point the finger at disgruntled employees, jealous lovers, crooked politicians or, in this case, schoolyard bullies.

The school board in Newport Beach, anticipating our needs, recently adopted an anti-bullying policy that declares harsh punishment for students who violate the “safe and harmonious relations that support human dignity and equality” on the campuses of the district’s 28 schools.

This sprang from an incident at Newport’s Corona del Mar High in which a student choked another boy, sending him to the hospital. The situation, which quite obviously took bullying to its outer edge, alerted both the school board and parents in the Newport-Mesa District to the need for (you guessed it) a policy.

My question to one of the board members was how do you recognize a bully, beyond, perhaps, a student who chokes another student to the edge of death? Well, they’re working on that.

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Board member Serene Stokes, a retired teacher who represents the Corona del Mar area, says they’re not looking for the kid who shoves another kid, but for the one who does it all the time, taunting the victim into seeking revenge the way they do on television and in the movies. Bang, you’re dead.

By educating students at the start of school about the need for mutual respect, she says, and by warning them about the consequences of harassing other students, the peace and happiness they seek will prevail in the sun-streaked environs of Newport Beach.

They want to break the code of silence that protects the bad kids by encouraging students to rat on each other. On the elementary level, teachers can spot bullies, but in high school, Stokes says, they can’t detect patterns. So they intend to make it “comfortable” for either victims or observers to tell someone in authority when bullying occurs.

But then, I’m still wondering, how many shoves is a kid allowed before he becomes a bully? When is a nickname a demeaning comment? When is an argument a display of verbal violence? When does anger become hatred? Questions, questions.

Stokes is a bright, caring lady who loves her children and her grandchildren and believes fiercely in the need to create a safe environment for the 22,000 students in her district.

But the problem she’s facing, and the problem facing school boards across the country, is that we’re looking for bullies in all the wrong places. Schools can educate, warn and hug the kids until they’re bug-eyed, but that’s only going to help a little bit. We’re the real bullies.

Through merchandising and manipulation, we bully vulnerable, unformed children into believing guns are cool, violent movies are cool, hate-filled lyrics are cool, bloody video games are cool, and smashing, crippling confrontations in sports are maybe not cool but at least fun to watch.

We call upon teens and preteens to grow up too soon, before they can perceive the line between fantasy and reality, and then we sob and wring our hands and wonder what went wrong when they cross the line.

We went wrong. We’re still going wrong. Society is the biggest bully of all, shielding by 1st and 2nd Amendments the purveyors of violence who profit at the expense of the human dignity that Stokes was talking about. No school district policy is about to change that.

To paraphrase Pogo, we has met the bully and he is us. And ain’t that too damned bad?

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.