Dear Mr. Deprado,

Did you ever look down from your podium and wonder how Kevin Brewer went from being the nerdy clarinet player in seventh grade, to the cool skater-punk in eighth grade? How could this quiet kid, just by learning to skateboard and use foul language, become an influence in our tiny world? It is probably just a matter of what we all went through at that age, the struggle to survive against the bullies in our world.

Last night I was flipping the channels through late-night oblivion, and I came across one of those omnipresent documentaries about "Africa’s Most Dangerous Predators." Of course it is in these wee hours, when everything else is turned off that I tend to "really" discover the undiscovered. In the tedious glow of that TV, I often find myself hiking the trail to Kilamanjaro, holding on to the roll-bar of the Landover making its way across the sandy road. I live the struggle of the wildebeest and the impala, and I discover no matter how sharp-toothed the lion, or how swift the cheetah, no matter how hysterical the hyena, or how crafty the pack of wild dogs, they all follow the same strategy--single out the weakest. And there on my couch, I realized that most of us are not, in fact, lions, hyenas, cheetahs, or even wild dogs. Most of us are assuredly just ugly wildebeests trying to nuzzle one another into comfort and safety, looking out for one another, struggling to survive. I am a wildebeest.

Mr. Dorward, our science teacher, gave a long presentation in the gym about this very thing. It was during one of those long northern California storms that sweeps in and makes the giant eucalyptus branches swing and crack and crash along the roads. For us, it meant pretending we didn’t want to get wet, but we "accidentally" forgot our umbrellas or raincoats. We hurried into the school gymnasium and took our places along the hard-plastic bleachers. Rows of kids slammed their heels into the hollow seats until it was thunder in the gymnasium, an enumerated poom poom poom like a mutated drum roll for Mr. Doward. He moved into the center of the gym, looking around slowly, waiting for us to get quiet enough for him to speak.

"You are all individuals," He said, "you all have a unique contribution to make to our society, and by motivating yourselves in your education, you will achieve success and admiration."

It reminded me of your classroom Mr. D, only this time it wasn’t just us. This time it was an entire school confused—all at the same time. I think everyone heard what Mr. Dorward said, but what exactly was the relevance of bringing one thousand sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in from a storm to tell them something that they wouldn’t understand? He stepped back a few paces, and a tiny student wearing jeans far too short for his legs rolled a squeaky cart to the center of the gym where Mr. Doward was standing. The student pulled a remote control from his front shirt pocket and handed it to the teacher. Without looking, Mr. Doward flashed the image from the slide projector onto the wall of the gym. It was remarkable how big this got along the gym wall, like a drive-in movie screen, a thousand times the size of life. The image was of a student, dressed in black, sitting crouched over, the sides of his long trench coat pulled back, his hair gelled straight up. Beside him was a silver boom box, and in his leather wrist-banded hand was a cigarette. He was bowing a plume of fresh smoke from the side of his mouth, and his eyes were intensely dark. Pimples grew along the left side of his nose like red sores.

"THIS is you" Mr. Dorward plainly exclaimed to us. "This is you." Some of the kids were screaming "yeeoooo!"—Like they had finally been acknowledged.

CLICK

The gym wall suddenly lit up with another image of two kids our age, one holding a skateboard watching the other kid kick hard along the asphalt. They were both wearing extra long, torn jean shorts and Izods with the collars turned up. Their heads were shaved on the sides, high and long on the top like mushrooms. Some of the kids in the audience were yelling "Yeah!" Mr. Dorward panned the audience and quietly mumbled. "Mmmm, this is you."

CLICK
In front of us now were two kids sitting in a classroom, a girl and a boy, looking up at the teacher. One of them was wearing thick glasses, and his dirty brown hair was sticking up in the back. Fresh from the pillow, he sat with his mouth gaping open and his eyes half closed. His shirt was way to small for him, and his jeans had turned bluish-white from age. He had brown tennis shoes on with Velcro straps instead of laces. The girl had pigtails, and she was sitting quietly behind him wearing a white, churchy dress.
"Freaks!" some kid yelled,
Mr. Dorward… "This is you."

CLICK

It got quiet now. The rain had turned to a steady stream beaming against the long, grayed gymnasium windows. On the wall now, larger than movie monsters, were two kids sitting at the playground. One was a small black kid locking his bike against the chain link fence. The other was a kid wearing overalls, his belly protruded far and spilled over onto his upper thighs. He had no chin, just a long square neck with a dimple in the middle. It was clear he had just locked his bike and had started walking to class. He looked out of breath in his oblong stride.

Some kids hooted awkwardly through the silence, but their calls died before they reached any kind of clarity.

Mr. Dorward half smiled, "This is you." But before the click, someone in the audience yelled back.

"No it ain’t . I’m no fat slob!" It was Kevin Brewer, three rows down from me. He sat there with his buddies, and they were laughing because he knew that in the half darkness he would get away with the ‘ungetawaywithable’ for the usual eighth grader.
Mr. Dorward called out, "That is enough! This is precisely what I mean. We are all of these and they are all of us."

I need to acknowledge that even though you taught us this very similar concept in your classroom Mr. Deprado, I admit that I had no idea of the mission you teachers were on. You were shields from cruelty because you knew what it was like.

"If we don’t recognize one anther despite our prejudices, then we will be nothing but distracted from success." Mr. Doward completely lost us until he CLICKED one last time, and there on the wall was the same overweight kid from the previous photo. He was standing against a wall, and a group of other kids surrounded him. Clearly they were laughing at him, and the kid’s face was flushed, rosy, and panicked. On the bottom of the photo were the printed words. "DO YOU KNOW A BULLY?" It was as if Mr. Dorward had waved a magic wand and sent us all reeling back to a time of defenselessness.

CLICK
On the wall were giant words elegantly displayed in flowing cursive, "Remember, we are all beautiful and unique but of one heart. Stand up to the Bully!"

The gym wall flickered with images of words and numbers. Mr. Dorward went on and on with definitions and statistics at an unrelenting, pre-MTV speed: "Twelve percent of American school children are the victims of bullying and that many are afraid to even go to school."

"Children also learn to bully others when adults do not tell them it's wrong."

"Many bullies are crying out for attention."

"One teacher finds that kids believe that teachers thought it was OK to behave this way because teachers didn't intervene, especially kids coming into middle school. As a result, students were confused. "Kids would say, 'I know I'm not supposed to feel bad because it's only a joke. But I do. I hate it,'" Ms. Shakeshaft said.

"In fact, a study by North Dakota's Mr. Hoover suggests that, if not told otherwise, students often believe that might makes right."

Afraid to go to school? There were times when I thought I had it bad, but I couldn’t fathom this. And suddenly, it all made sense.

Kevin Brewer gained popularity as the year went on, and even though I wasn’t good friends with him, we still played basketball at lunch, and sometimes we even took the bike path home together.

Even after the storm season subsided, the bike path I took from the school to my bus stop was usually flooded over or at the very least became a strong obstacle course. The path itself was long and narrow, cutting the wetland in half. This preserved estuary was sacred ground to me. Each day I rode along Tiburon and Mill Valley on my way to Sausalito, and this bike path, the reeds high above me, and the great blue herons like crazy dinosaur birds all along it, they were my kind greeters welcoming me home to a more natural world where there wasn’t any awkwardness.

One day, my safe haven was interrupted. Halfway down the path, where a patch of ground had dried and hardened, I found Kevin Brewer, Jonas, and a few others gathered in a tight circle. They were smoking, laughing, and spinning the wheels on their skateboards. They spilled over into the main path, so I had to stop my bike.

"Hey guys." I looked at them and smiled. We were all friends, but something had changed. I felt a sense of violation for what they were doing, and there was a darkness that settled there—a creeping like when you first come home and all the lights are off, and the light switch isn’t working, and suddenly you are standing in the familiar ground of your house, but you are bathed in darkness. There is that sudden feeling of something moving around you. Kevin looked upon at me.

"Hey Jew boy?"

He smiled almost as if I was supposed to take this warmly, a sarcastic expression of acceptance. Sadly, I wanted this. I wanted them to accept me, but the wind came up soft along the shallow water, and something stirred inside me, so instead I stood up on my pedals and started away.

"Where you going Jew boy?" Jew boy, Jew boy, Jew boy. The words rolled down the bike path on tiny skateboards behind me.

They were there day after day, and a few times they even stopped me from riding quickly by them. They made it a point to stop me and make me talk to them. "Jew boy" they would say, "what’s wrong with you? Are you scared?" Once they even tripped me. You know the joke where one kid gets your attention and stares you straight in the face while another kid gets on all fours behind you and then you fall back over him, your knees buckling. My head hit the pavement hard.

"Go ahead Jew boy, tell your mommy and daddy on us. Go ahead, Jew boy is clumsy."

I didn’t tell my parents, but I plotted, and I planned. I told my friends that something had to be done. One of my friends who believed in Jesus asked Him to help us to know what to do. We listened as he prayed for an answer about justice. We just wanted to hurt them. We wanted to throw their skateboards into the salty marsh, and we wanted to ask them if they even knew what being a Jew boy meant. I kept imagining the pictures from the assembly, and Mr. Dorwards simple voice, "this is you, this is you," and I knew, even then, that Kevin was no lion, he was just another wildebeest jockeying for position when he should just be nuzzling. I was like him, he was like me, and so something strange happened. We decided we would talk to him and ask him why he was saying what he was saying, and we thought we would do it in front of everyone just before first bell.

So the next day, my friends and I met at the basketball court and walked as a unit to where Kevin Brewer and his friends hung out on the stairs near homeroom. But a curious thing had happened. There was a crowd gathered there already, and a lot of teachers and kids were yelling. When we made our way through, we saw Kevin Brewer with his hands and mouth bloodied and broken. His friends were crying, and teachers and students were moving unnaturally around the patio. Later on, we found out that just before first bell, Kevin Brewer and his friends had moved to their usual spot, but Jamal Greenwood had been sitting there reading his homework from the night before. It seemed that Kevin Brewer had decided that all territory was his to control, and from his seat of power he said something along the lines of..."You are in my spot." or "This is our place or you better move!" Whichever way he said it ended with cruel annunciation of the "N" word. Jamal didn’t wait, he had heard this word before, and pretty soon Brewer was unconscious and just now coming to. It appeared that Justice reached Brewer before we could.

Brewer was suspended for two weeks. Jamal, expelled.

I know we are all connected. I know that we live by something deep down that governs our behavior. It is most evident when we are born, and in its best cases it remains "less" tainted as time goes by, but it seems like bullying is the beginning of the real loss of childhood innocence.

I guess now, I like to think that I was never a bully, or that I never pushed anyone around. I do know Mr. Deprado that even today just the thought of those words, "Jew boy," makes me cringe, makes me angry. What can one person do about this very thing because even now almost half of all students, by the time they reach high school, say they have been a victim of cruelty whether it was physical, ethnic or cultural.

So, Mr. Deprado, I can honestly tell you that my experiences with bullies might have mad me tougher, made me wary of cruelty. When I think about Brewer, and the kids who have been bullied, I think about how we are, as Mr. Dorward in his assembly said that day, "unique and wonderful and of one heart." And now at my age I can’t understand why people don’t turn to kindness first, to love first. We are born with this simple desire to do good things, and when we finally do give, it feels like coming home. I think I might hold an assembly at the college where I work. I might call people into the gymnasium and roll out an old-fashioned slide show projector. I will show them pictures of Africa. We will talk about the predators of Africa and how they seek out their prey. I will look into the eyes of the supposed predators. I will ask everyone to leave their seats and file down the bleachers onto the floor, and we will imagine we are prey. We will stand in the silence, awkwardly among each other. We will all be prey, we will all be vulnerable. At our worst, some will leave and laugh and never return, but maybe, just maybe, some will find they are home when they let themselves surrender, find the courage to let go of self for a brief time and just be wildebeests, nuzzling.

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