I was going to talk about something else tonight. But instead, I am going to grab my shovel and dig up some of my worst skeleton, and talk about an episode of Ultimate Spider-Man

It’s an episode called The Rhino, although they should have just called it The One About Bullying.

In it, a little nerdy guy named Alex is bullied by reliable asshole Flash Thompson. Little nerdy guy steals stuff from Oscorp that turns him into The Rhino. (I don’t like the redesign. His horn is hard to see and his head is a giant triangle.)

Now, the adult in me thinks the episode was superb. It hit all the right notes about telling people when you are bullied (hard to do for boys, because it means showing weakness) and not becoming a monster from the bullying.

Seriously, there was a scene that practically shouted “Don’t shoot up your school over this!”

It had some fun bits too. When Alex becomes The Rhino, his IQ plummets, and he ends up saying things like “Me smart good!”.

Buuuut as you all know, I was severely bullied as a child. So this is not about the adult in me. It’s about the kid in me, and the kid in me had entirely different reactions to the show.

The kid in me was totally with Alex. I wanted him to get his revenge on Flash. If I was Spider-Man, even though I would have regretted it deeply afterwards, I would have just let the Rhino do whatever he wanted to Flash.

I am not saying that is the right thing to do. It isn’t. But it is what I would feel like doing so there is a little fucking accountability in this world. Flash would have died a quite horrible and messy death, and I would have had that on my conscience for my entire life, but I am not sure I could resist the urge to just let Flash reap what he’d sown.

Particularly painful was Spider-Man (my number one guy) telling Alex that he should go to the school principle or the school counselors or his friends and tell them he is being bullied.

That made a very painful and extremely rapid montage of some of the worst moments in my life to speed through my amygdala. Because it is one thing to be savaged by your classmates to the point where your only chance for safety is to hide.

It’s another thing, a much worse thing, to finally pluck up the courage to go to the authorities, only to have them not care and not do a damned thing to stop it.

I am just glad I was out of that school when I realized the even worse truth : the teachers didn’t help me because, deep down, they thought I deserved it. They didn’t like me either, and to them, my being bullies was justice. I deserved it for being a smartass little prick in class. I deserved it for being so weird.

I deserved it because I was a pathetic, wimpy little geek, and the teachers, like everyone else, had absolutely no respect for me at all.

So when I want to them, I just got brushed off. They would say thing like “they’re just jealous of you” or “the bully is just a coward” or, the ultimate rusty dagger to the heart, “You must have done SOMETHING to provoke them. ”

Yeah, I existed. What an unforgivable affront.

The teachers acted concerned when I told them, but you know, not concerned enough to get up from their desk and actually do something about it. They just wanted me to go away.

And don’t think this is just about the bully. The bully is only the active component of a much larger and darker social reality. The bully is picking on you and not someone else because they instinctively grasp that you are at the absolute bottom of the totem pole, and that therefore you are a safe target for their aggression because not only will nobody come to your defense (not even the teachers), they all deep down think you deserve it for being so weird.

The bully is only acting on what the whole school is thinking. Your schoolmates know you disrupt the social fabric wherever you go and make things harder on everyone, and so to them, this is almost like revenge on you for hurting them by being so nonconformist, weird, and (this is the worse part) pathetic.

When you are a wimpy kid, it is impossible for people to respect you. You have no status presence. Other people instinctively get that a certain kind of attitude sends a social signal that you have your social ground and will defend it.

But not so the wimpy kid. Just by being ourselves, in total innocence, we tell the other naked beach apes “I am the lowest, and you can crap on me all you want!”.

If the authorities had protected me, or even tried to protect me, that would send the signal that I had some value and was not, therefore, devoid of status.

But when people do horrible things to you and suffer no consequence from their peer group or school, it sends a very clear signal that you are worthless.

That is how an entire school bullies a child. It’s not simply that other kids stand by and watch and are just glad it’s not them. It’s that they all, on some level, think you are just getting what you deserve for being wimpy and weird.

Left to their own devices, the natural state of human social interaction is unkind to nonconformists of low status. We males become the whipping boys for the entire social structure.

It is only through law (of whatever kind) and justice that the weak are protected from the strong. I swear, if the authorities had protected me, I would probably be an Establishment conservative now.

But they didn’t. I could not have been more alone in that savage world we seem to think is perfectly okay for kids called “the playground”. My parent were no help either… they barely knew I existed.

So, that was elementary school for me.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.