Bully

     Life is a fight, but not everyone's a fighter. Otherwise, bullies would be an endangered species."  Andrew Vachss        By now, you've probably seen or heard about the bullying of Amanda Todd.  She was a young Canadian girl who made the kind of mistake that young people sometimes do: She was enticed by a stranger to flash her breasts on a webcam. This haunted her for the rest of her life and ultimately destroyed her, as those photos followed her wherever she went. She changed schools, she moved, and eventually she posted this video which told her whole sad story.  She's gone now, dead by suicide before her life ever got started.     When I read her hopeful words she posted along with the video - "I hope I can show you guys that everyone has a story and everyone's future will be bright one day, you just gotta pull through. I'm still here aren't I? - it almost breaks my heart.      Now, there are calls for the predator who stalked her to be tracked down and punished, and I hope that happens. It might lend some sense of closure to the people who loved Amanda. But... of course... it won't bring Amanda back. Her race is run.     This is just the latest case that has made headlines over the last few years where bullied young people took their own lives. I have to wonder, is bullying getting worse, are more young people giving up and killing themselves, or did we just not hear about it as much previously?     Bullying has been around forever. The larger and broken have been picking on the smaller and soon-to-be-broken since history began.     I was small all my life, until a growth spurt when I was 15. Even then, I went from short and skinny to tall and skinny.  Also, I was fairly smart, I wore glasses (think: Buddy Holly) I liked to read, and I got along well with my teachers. In other words, I couldn't have had a larger target on me if I had painted one by hand.     And... I was bullied. There were bigger, stronger, older kids at Mossyrock Junior High and High School that were more than happy to try and adjust their own low self-image by scaring the crap out of me or occasionally resorting to actual physical violence.      I never spoke to anyone about it, because 1) I didn't think it would help and 2) I thought it would make things worse.       I was lucky, though. It wasn't like what I read about where kids are harassed to the point of suicide. I never felt alone. I had friends like Jerry Weible and Harold Crook and Mark Panter that I could hang out with, and there was safety in numbers.     Some people say that living well is the best revenge, but we had other ideas. On the last day of school of our freshman year, Harold and I walked into the boys restroom in the high school and found one of those bullies while he was... contemplating the universe on his throne.  He was a senior, and wouldn't be around any more after that day. Without taking time to think about the consequences, we took a bucket full of water, stood on the toilet of the stall next to his and dumped it all over him. And then we ran. And ran. And ran. We were small, but we were motivated by fear for our lives. If our lives were a movie, he would have caught up with us eventually, but he didn't. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing him again.     Life got better, and easier, as it almost always does.  And that is the message that I wish I could send to every picked-on kid: Hold on. Be who you are, and be proud of it. The people who want to belittle you are sick, broken people that will never have any true happiness in their life unless they change and grow. You, on the other hand, can find happiness just by being yourself, if you don't let them strip everything away from you.      The last message that Amanda Todd flashed in her video was "I have nobody. I need someone." Of course, that wasn't true. There were many people that would have loved to have helped her.  Her video was a cry for help, but she didn't wait for it to be answered and didn't stay alive long enough to find the people that would have loved to help her.  Rest in Peace.