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The words we hear about ourselves as children are the words we believe until we grow up to know better. I think back now and wonder how different things might have been if just one person with authority had stood up and said “Stop.” Or “No.” If we’d lived in a time when different was cool. When gay was okay.

But we didn’t. And so kids like my brother were on their own. Even the people who loved him so desperately felt helpless. The words he’d heard all through his childhood had been planted so deeply, it would take years to shed them.

We can’t do this anymore. We can’t pretend that words are just words. We can’t say kids will be kids. We can’t dismiss cruelty as a rite of passage. We can’t be onlookers. We can’t say, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” We can’t teach our kids to not step forward and say “Stop.” And “No.” We have to say it. We have to shout it.

School administrators can’t say it’s up to the parents. Parents can’t say it’s up to the teachers. Teachers can’t say it’s not their job. And kids can’t say, “I was too afraid to tell.” Every single one of us has to play our role if we’re serious about putting an end to the madness. We are all responsible. We must be.

Stop.

No.

They are simple words. And they can save lives.

Memory Videos

by Nancy Garden

Memory videos play in my mind whenever I hear another child has been bullied.

Take one:

I’m seven years old, walking home from school in Crestwood, New York. I’m walking carefully because I’m not sure where James is, and I’m afraid of him. He’s bigger and older and stronger than I, and every time he goes after me, he wins. This time, though, I’m not as afraid as usual because Daddy has taught me to box so I can fight James.

Suddenly, just as I reach the big hill that goes down to our neighborhood, James darts out from behind a bush and attacks me, punching hard. I make fists and remember which hand guards and which punches—but before I can protect myself or swing, James grabs my arms and pins them behind me, and I burst into tears.

Another time, James and I fight about a dog book while our dogs and my friends watch. Suddenly James ends up facedown on the ground—perhaps my friends have pushed him. His pants slip, and my friends giggle and laugh, pointing to his exposed brown buttocks, speckled with white spots.

James is African-American and the rest of us are white. He’s the only black child in my class and probably in the school.

Now that I’m older, I wonder if James became a bully because he’d been bullied himself. That seems likely, and I remember, too, that sometimes he threw up in class after lunch. After the first or second time, the teacher said to us, “When James throws up, I want all of you to get up and leave the room.” She showed him no sympathy and was clearly not going to let any of us show him sympathy either.

Many bullied kids become bullies themselves. Some bullies even become adult criminals.

I was sorry for James when he threw up, but I didn’t do anything about it. Did I laugh with my friends when I saw James’s buttocks? My memory video doesn’t show me that. But it does show me that I didn’t say “Stop!” or “Don’t laugh!” or “Let him up!”

I’d gone from being a victim to being a bystander.

Bystanders who do nothing give bullies permission inadvertently to go on being bullies. Most are afraid they’ll lose friends or be bullied themselves if they help victims or report bullies, and some feel guilty for years afterward.

TAKE TWO:

My mother, whose parents and older siblings were born in Germany, is telling me a story. She’s comforting me because a girl has told me no one likes me because I smile too much. Worse, two boys have been chasing and attacking me. Kids have been calling me “four eyes,” too. Mum says, “When I was a Girl Scout during World War One, other children yelled ‘German Spy!’ at me as I walked to and from school in my uniform.”

Today I have no idea what prompted the name-calling or what was the reason for my unpopularity. But the boys who chased me were children of recent immigrants; had they been bullied, too, like James, for being “different,” “other,” “foreign”? My video doesn’t tell me that, but I think Mum was trying to explain that many children are bullied—not just me.

And of course she was right.