THE NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY

As kids will do when moving to a new location, one of my first objectives upon arriving in Buckeye was to meet all the neighborhood kids and make friends. In fact some of those I met that summer of 1954 are still friends today. This story isn’t about them. It’s about the kid who was the local bully.

Jacky lived across the street. He was in my class but was bigger and a year older than me because he’d been “kept back a year.” It quickly became clear that one of his goals was to make my life miserable by bullying me every chance he got. Having never encountered this before, I was at a loss for how to deal with it.

One evening after watching the “Wednesday Night Fights” I convinced myself that I needed to defend myself the next time Jacky bothered me. Well it happened the next day. So I laid into him with swinging fists, only to end up with a bloody nose and the worse end of the fight. The funny thing was, though, that he stopped bullying me after that.

Please understand that I am not advocating physical confrontation as the only way to deal with a bully. However, there are times, whether dealing with the bad guy in the neighborhood or the bad guy (country) around the world, that we must confront unwarranted aggression with physical force. I recently read Navy Seal Eric Greiten’s book The Heart and the Fist. He makes the same point. You might want to read it.