Page 26 - Fire Your Personal Trainer and Kick Your Own Damn Ass

Fire Your Personal Trainer 23
And Kick Your Own Damn Ass

One of the greatest myths of all time is that if you stand up to bullies,
they will back down because they are cowards underneath. This is a
joke! The people who say this; and there a lot of them; do not know what
they’re talking about. I have no idea why this myth persists but I hear this
all the time. It is a part of our culture. We have this need to believe that
the “good” people prevail when they stand up for themselves and for
others. With bullies sometimes this works and a lot of times it doesn’t.

When I look back on the bullies I encountered, their motivations were
complex. Some kids got a perverse thrill out of the look of fear in the
faces of their victims. I saw it played out many times. It turns my stomach
to think about it. I recall a boy in elementary school spinning around and
around holding his school bag at arms-length like an Olympic hammer
thrower on my front lawn trying to keep a bully away from him. The
school bag hit the bully in the face and opened up a gash on his forehead.
The blood poured out of the gash and streamed down the bully’s face,
and the bully laughed as the kid ran off screaming. The bully was totally

unfazed by the gash. He got a big thrill out of terrorizing the other kid.

Think about that the next time you are listening to some pop psychologist
tell you bullies are just cowards and if you stand up to them, they will
back down. If you want to watch a movie that captures the malevolent
side of bullying in a very realistic way, watch “THE MAN WHO SHOT
LIBERTY VALENCE.” That movie nails it.

Eighth grade was better than seventh and for a while I actually thought
all this nonsense was behind me. Then I had those two fights during the
summer before the start of 9th grade, and I felt like crap.

Now, here I was living out my parents’ dream for me going to a private
high school where hazing was an accepted, no - institutionalized – part
of the lesson plan; and I was sitting on a bus with a bunch of jackasses