Some of the Jews went along with the order.  They dropped their old religion and began worshiping Zeus because it was easier than standing up to the king (and his army).  The Maccabees, though, refused to change their beliefs simply because someone threatened them.  They believed that they had the right to worship as they saw fit and they were willing to fight for that right.

And fight they did.  The Maccabees gathered a group of Jews who believed similarly.  They were outnumbered and outgunned (in a manner of speaking – guns weren’t used back then), but they had the advantages of surprise and knowledge of the terrain.  They used these to drive the Syrian army away and reclaim their religious freedom.

This story is chock full of lessons.  Usually, people take the obvious moral of religious freedom from it.  The Syrian king was wrong to impose his religious beliefs on others. People should be able to worship whatever god they want (or no god at all) however they choose.  Recent events, though, have led me to take a slightly different lesson from the story: Don’t back down to bullies.

Antiochus was a bully, albeit one with an army at his disposal.  He wanted to set the rules for others to follow and, if they didn’t follow it, he demanded they be punished.  He couldn’t stand to see people doing things that he personally didn’t approve.

Many of the Jews, when faced with the bully, backed down.  They gave in and just did what the bully told them to do.  This is the quick and easy path.  (Sorry, the geek in me couldn’t help quoting Yoda.)  The Maccabees didn’t give in, though.  They stood up to the bully.  They refused to let the bully silence them or dictate the terms of their lives.

As a victim of bullying growing up, I promised myself that I would never let myself be silenced by bullies again.  Once I became a father, I knew that I wanted to teach my sons not to back down to bullies also.  This doesn’t need to mean physical violence, but it also doesn’t mean you should cower in fear.

Recently, I found myself sitting in silence.  A bully that had targeted me in the past had turned her attention to others and I didn’t want to speak up lest she turn her eye back to me.  I wasn’t cowering in fear, as this particular bully has no power over me.  Still, I just didn’t want to have to deal with her antics again .  Then it struck me: Would the Maccabees have done this?  More importantly, do I want to teach my sons to keep quiet when someone is bullying someone else?  The answer to both is a resounding NO!

Over the past 18 months (off and on), I’ve been the target of a bully.  I won’t go into her history too much.  You can read about that elsewhere.  Instead, I want to talk about her current activities.  She’s begun targeting bloggers, specifically review bloggers as well as blogger networks like MomCentral, MomSelect, Business2Blogger, and MyBlogSpark.  She’ll claim that they are fakes, will demand they take down their blogs, and will try reporting them to companies.  Amazingly, some companies are listening to her!

In this woman’s mind, all of these blogs and networks are run by a group of 4 or 5 people to steal products.  Her evidence?  She was told this by God.  Yes, she is a self-proclaimed prophet of God.

You can read more about her here:

http://blogs.babble.com/momcrunch/2011/12/19/bloggers-targeted-by-woman-claiming-gift-of-prophecy/

http://mombloghate.com/9/bully-profile-dawn-gordon/

As I said before, I’m through staying silent.  If you’ve been threatened, please speak up.  If you haven’t been threatened (yet), please send this information to every blogger you know.  Spread the word.  Let’s send the message that we bloggers don’t take kindly to bullies and will protect our fellow bloggers if threatened.

Listening to this story, I can’t help but think about my experiences with bullying and how they seem similar.  Bullies will often dictate the terms of the bully-bullied exchanges.  They will tell the bullied that they can’t tell anyone or else.  It’s a way of gaining additional power over your victim.  Besides, if you set the rules, you’re assured that you will always win.

When one is bullied or when one is confronting a respected icon, the social pressure is very similar.  There is constant pressure to keep quiet.  To mind your own business and not get involved or, if you are involved, to not seek outside help.  After all, those are the rules and you must obey the rules!

Even after I escaped my bullying scenario, I felt this pressure.  One time in college, I returned to my dorm room to see a door open and a guy and a girl play-fighting.  The guy got her into a hold she couldn’t escape from and she called to ask for my help.  I started to go in that direction and the guy told me to leave them alone.  I immediately turned around and headed into my room.

While I don’t think anything bad happened, I still, to this day, regret that decision.  Someone asked me for help (even if it was just play-fighting) and I should have helped.  While I can’t correct past mistakes, I can prevent future ones.  I can learn not to give into societal pressures to keep quiet and I can teach my boys the same lesson.

The second story on my mind involves a ten year old girl who committed suicide after being bullied.  I shudder at the thought of this happening to my boys.  When I was bullied, I believed that I had to handle it myself.  I didn’t think that I could talk to my parents or teachers about it.  That isolation got to be almost more than I could bear at times.  I would dread going to school because of the mental torture that that building held for me.  I never got to the point where I considered ending my life, however.  We’ve already spoken to NHL about bullying as, sadly, he’s experienced it first hand.  How do you talk to your eight-year old about suicide, though?

In the final story, a special needs child who was bullied by her teachers.  The teachers, principal, and even superintendent called the girl a liar for the “stories” she told about the teachers’ tormenting behaviors.  The superintendant even had the gall to tell the father that he was bordering on slander and harassment by making these claims.  Their investigations, they asserted, showed that these were made up stories that the girl was telling.  (Never mind that their “investigation” consisted of nothing more than asking the accused teachers what happened.)

Thankfully, the father didn’t back down.  He hid an audio recording device on his daughter and recorded 7 hours of verbal abuse.  Once presented with recordings, the school finally acted.

How do these three stories tie together?  I think they all illustrate how we need to react and teach our kids to respond to bullying.  First, we can’t allow ourselves to be silenced by societal pressure.  If you are being bullied, speak up.  If you know someone who is being bullied speak up.  Break those bully-set rules and get loud about the abuse.

Secondly, we need to support our children when they are bullied.  Not just in our actions to resolve the bullying situations, but also by sitting down with our kids and talking about what was happening.  The more support our kids receive, the better they’ll be able to deal with the situation.

Finally, never give up.  If the teacher won’t act, talk to the principal.  If the principal turns a blind eye, go to the superintendent.  Keep going higher and making more noise.  Threaten to go to the press.  Follow through.  Don’t take “no” for an answer.

Here’s hoping that no more people keep quiet, that no more boys or girls take their own lives, and that no more kids need to grow up knowing the torture that is being bullied.

When I first heard about the planes hitting, I was in my office.  It was like a bad movie come to life.  I kept feeling like at any moment, there would be a climatic battle, the good guys would win over impossible odds, the credits would roll, and then we’d see everything go back to normal.  Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

As the planes hit and the towers collapsed, I was worried about my father and my friend, G.  My father worked in New York City at the time and, while he wasn’t near the World Trade Center, we didn’t know if all of New York City was going to be attacked.  G, meanwhile, actually worked in the World Trade Center.  I couldn’t remember if he was in one of the towers or other buildings.  I got on AIM and connected with some ex-co-workers of mine and G’s mom.  She hadn’t heard from him.

Then, I heard that the towers collapsed.  At first, I thought that the person meant that the top few floors collapsed, not the entire building.  As the enormity of what was happening sank in, I began to panic thinking that G had been killed.  Finally, we heard from him that he was ok.  He got out of the subway, saw the two towers smoking and got as far away as possible.  (I found out later that he worked in one of the other WTC buildings.)

Ten years later, I was thinking about the attacks during NHL’s first day of Hebrew school.  I was thinking of how I would describe 9-11 to NHL when, suddenly, it hit me: Terrorists are bullies.  Bullies in a school setting rule by fear.  Whether it is fear of being beaten up, fear of being excluded from social cliques, or fear of being embarrassed in front of your peers, bullies thrive on fear.  They attempt to define the rules to position themselves at the top of the social heap at the expense of others.  Often, bullies don’t even have the muscle to enforce their threats.  However, they rely on fear to magnify their perceived power.

Terrorists are like the grown-up, international versions of bullies.  They want the world structured a certain way.  It isn’t.  They could work within society, but they honestly don’t have enough power to enact the changes they desire.  So, instead, they rely on fear.  They use fear to magnify their perceived power.  They use fear to get people to do what they (the terrorists) want.  They use fear to get their way (or else).

Meanwhile, I thought back to my feelings during the events of September 11th.  I remember feeling so helpless.  There were so many people that needed help and I was powerless to do anything.  I remember thinking that, if only I was a comic book-style superhero, I could help out.  I could activate my power ring or quickly change into my costume and then fly there at supersonic speeds to rescue people when they needed help the most.

Sadly, I don’t have super-powers so I was forced to sit on the sidelines watching it all go down on TV.  There were real superheroes there, though: The first responders.  Think about it.  If Spider-Man, Batman, or any other superhero saw a building on fire, what would they do?  They would hurl themselves into the building without a thought in their head about their own safety.  They would do their best and push themselves beyond all normal (and superhuman) limitations until everyone was safe.

On 9-11, firefighters ran up the stairs of the burning twin towers.  They ran up holding a hundred pounds of gear and without any thought of their own safety.  Yes, many people were killed that sad day, but 20,000 were saved.  This is in no small part thanks to the firefighters and other first responders.  Toss a cape and mask on them and you had a legion of superheroes saving lives.

Through mysterious footage captured on an old malfunctioning video camera, Sinclair High School’s star quarterback, Tyler McFarland, learns that some of his teammates have been bullying Cory Walker, a troubled new transfer student.  Aware that sharing this information with the coach might get his friends kicked off the team and ultimately cost the school the state championship, Tyler must choose what’s more important: winning or doing what’s right.

Here is the trailer:

The story opens to introduce Tyler, his family and community.  Tyler plays for his high school’s football team.  His sister is a bit of a bookworm, devouring any books she comes across from a small shop owner.  The shop owner shows her an old, temperamental video camera.  It works, but only when it wants to.  More than that, it begins to show her footage of horses and other things.

Meanwhile, Cory Walker starts his first day at the high school.  He’s a foster child, having lost his mother years ago and never having known his father.  He is a quiet individual who hides a keen mind.  It is this keen mind that winds up getting him into trouble with a couple of players on the football team who bullies him for “making him look bad in front of his friends.”  Cory’s crime?  Answering a teacher’s question when asked to after one of the players couldn’t.

Tyler, the team captain, asks the football players who deny any involvement, but then finds out his teammates were lying when the video camera shows him just what went down.  Yes, this camera seems to have a bit of magic in its old circuitry!

Tyler’s then faced with the prospect of just how to respond.  A big game is coming up and the football players involved are needed to win.  Should he do the right thing and doom his team to losing (thus making himself an outcast as well)?  Should he turn them in only after the big game is over?  Or should he ignore the whole thing because this kind of thing has always gone on?

As a victim of bullying, I identified with much of Cory’s character.  At one point, he obviously knows the answer to a question in class and blurts out an answer without thinking.  When the teacher asks him for clarification, he hems and haws, uncomfortable with the spotlight that will likely lead to another bullying confrontation.  After the incidents, he is close to tears over the entire situation.

During high school, I felt that way many times.  There were many times that I wished that I could just shrink myself down until I’d disappear or hide myself somewhere to cry without giving my bullies more ammunition to use against me.

The bullies in the movie also use a tactic I’ve seen real-life bullies use: Framing the situation to their benefit.  They will attempt to dictate what the appropriate responses the bullied individual (or bystanders) can take to their actions.  Of course, these “bully approved” actions either solely benefit the bully or come at great cost to the bullied/bystander.  This can leave the bullied feeling like they have no choice and no options.  Isolation is a bully’s best friend.

Without spoiling the movie, I will say that I found the ending a tad unrealistic, but this is, after all, a family movie and not a hard-hitting expose on bullying.  I didn’t really expect plot threads that lingered for years or decades and issues that went unresolved for the rest of the characters’ lives.  In a movie like this, everything is tied up into a neat little bow by the closing credits.  Expecting that, it was quite entertaining and I would definitely recommend for people to tune in.

The premiere of Field of Vision is on Saturday, June 11 on NBC at 8pm ET/7pm CT.  More information is available from their website and Facebook page.

Disclosure: I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Dad Central Consulting on behalf of P&G and received a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

One interesting wrinkle to this story was NHL’s reaction.  While in the nurse’s office, he was crying, sad that he had upset the child and had hurt his feelings.  NHL blamed himself for the bullying incident even though he had done nothing that warranted a punch in the ribs.  He even, over that weekend, listed the child as his friend.  Yes, the kid that punched him in the ribs was still a friend to NHL.

As you may recall, I was bullied a lot when I was growing up.  One incident in particular happened in middle school  At the risk of retelling a story I’ve blogged about before, I only had one person that I considered my friend at the time.  That was RH.

The only problem with RH being my friend was that he would stab me in the back.  Literally.  With a pen.  He would bully me for awhile and then would play the victim, claiming that he had heard from a third person that I had said something bad about him.  Then we would be friends again until he decided to bully me again.

Why did I keep taking him back as a friend when he kept bullying me?  Simple.  I felt like I had no other friends.  If I admitted to myself that RH wasn’t my friend, I was left friendless.  At the time, a horrible friend seemed better than no friend at all.  It scared me to see this scenario playing out again in NHL’s school.

Then, in a display of good timing, I saw a tweet from @sociallysmart (aka Corinne Gregory) about the covering up of bullying incidents.  To summarize the article (which is a must read for all parents), school administrators across the country are turning a blind eye to bullying because it makes them look bad if they admit there is a problem.  Of course, this is a case of short term gain-long term loss.  What the school administrators gain in the short term (saving face and avoiding bad PR), the kids lose in the long term (higher incidence of bullying with little to no consequences).

The only solution is for parents to know their (and their children’s) rights and stand up for them.  It might be tough to do at times, but it is essential for our children’s well being.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Have you or your child ever been bullied by someone you/they considered a friend?  How did you/they react?

Also, don’t forget to enter my Aerobie Sprint Flying Ring giveaway.  It’s ending in four days and has a very low amount of entries (as I write this).

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #87

Yesterday, I was watching an online video of the Mythbusters.  They were trying to test a myth from the movie Hellboy where a speeding car has it’s hood smashed in by Hellboy and goes flipping over.  Kari, Grant and Tory were having problems as the giant metal fist they made and the SUV wouldn’t get into right position at the right time.  Suddenly, I remembered the Mythbusters motto: Failure is always an option.

On the way into school today, I told NHL about this (promising to show him the episode later on).  He remembered other episodes we saw where they tried something and didn’t get it to work.  Specifically, he recalled Adam and Jamie’s Christmas-themed Rube Goldberg device which failed in every way imaginable and a few ways they didn’t imagine beforehand.

Were the Mythbusters frustrated?  Sure.  Were they upset that it didn’t work right?  Of course.  Did they quit?  No.  I told NHL that, when the Mythbusters failed at something, they figured out what went wrong, fixed it as best they could and tried their best again and again and again.  I told him that failing at something wasn’t bad.  Everyone fails at some point in their lives.  It’s how you react to the failure that’s key.  If you cry and whine and never try again, that’s bad.  If you dust yourself off, figure out what went wrong and try again, you’re learning from your mistakes and turning the failure into something useful.

The next piece of advice came after NHL told me that a classmate of his had called him a “loser.”  This hurt me deeply.  As I’ve written about before, I was a victim of bullying for many years.  I thought back to when I was a child hearing insults be thrown my way and thinking that I had no recourse.  I tried to come up with some advice for him.  This was my advice:

Don’t listen to them, NHL.  You aren’t a loser just because someone says you are.  Don’t let their words have any power over you.  If someone puts you down or criticizes you, tune them out.  Ignore them.  Of course, if mom, dad or your teacher say you’re doing something wrong, don’t tune us out.  Pretty much everyone else can be tuned out, though, when they say negative things about you.  The most important opinion is your own.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What piece of advice have you given your children recently?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #67

An individual believes that we are someone else, someone she knows. Thanks to this, she will not leave us alone. We have blocked her on Twitter and gone to other precautions to safeguard our family.

I can not go into a lot of specifics, but I wanted to let my readers, PR professionals, and companies that I have worked with know what is going on in general terms. Why now? Well, this individual has been threatening to contact you. Via blog contact forms and comments, along with other tactics, she has stated numerous times that she will be notifying you of our so-called "lying ways to get free items."

B and I have worked long and hard to build trusting relationships with everyone on our blogs and beyond. We hope that you will work with us while we try to get this matter taken care of.

Thank you for your support.

This week, NHL had swim lessons.  Usually, we all go and I play with JSL while NHL learns how to swim.  This time, though, NHL’s Hebrew school had an open house at the same time.  So we divided the chores.  B went to the open house, JSL went to stay with B’s parents and I went with NHL to his swim class.

While watching NHL go in and out of the pool, I looked around me.  I was surrounded by parents of kids around NHL’s age.  This was my peer group.  I always complain of not having any offline friends to hang out with, so why not make some friends here?

Yet, there I sat.  I was tweeting effortlessly with people online, but offline I barely managed a two sentence small-talk with someone who I overheard was sending his child to the same child care center that NHL went to.

I had a similar experience in BlogHer.  There were plenty of decent conversations that I engaged in, but when I was outside of my comfort zone, I just sat there and kept quiet.  I wanted to join in the conversations, but it was like my brain froze up and could offer nothing to converse about.

At least partially as a result of the bullying I suffered through, I’ve always struggled with face-to-face communications.  I’ll be paralyzed in fear that something I say will be completely wrong, inappropriate, unfunny, etc.  I’ve worked hard to suppress and surmount that fear, but parts of it will always be with me.  It’s just one of the ways that bullying has made me weaker, not stronger.

Meanwhile, the Internet has been a godsend.  By removing the face-to-face aspect, I become a much more confident and social individual.  If I send out a tweet and realize it was a bad joke, I shrug my shoulders and send out another tweet.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you find that you are much more social online than offline?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #61

The basic gist of the article is that bullying takes two to work.  The bully and the bullied.  The author says that if the bullied kids would simply fight back, bullies would move on to someone else.  He also declares that bullying is a fact of life and parents who come to their children’s aid in cases of bullying are only making the situation worse.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a quote from the article:

Every time you intercede on your child’s behalf or appeal to the school system, every time you negotiate for more impotent rules to attempt to govern the behavior of other people’s kids, every time you whisk your child away from an unpleasant situation without encouraging them to solve it for themselves, every time you give away your child’s power to stand up for themselves to a teacher, monitor, lawyer, principal, you make them that much weaker and more vulnerable to bullying, especially when they’re very young. It’s akin to blasting your immune system with antibiotics every time you get a runny nose. The immune system’s ability to fight back is never tested and strengthened, and when some serious illness comes along, your body completely caves in. The same exact principle is at work every time you swoop in to rescue your child.

The bolding is his, not mine.  According to him, if NHL is bullied in school, I should tell him to just be a man and punch the kid in the nose.  That’ll stop the big, bad bully real quick.  I guess then I should crack open a beer and yell at my wife because dinner is three minutes late.  Sorry, for a minute there I was transported back to the 1950’s.  Bullying is a complex subject and one response definitely does not fit all.  It definitely isn’t as easy as “buck it up and fight like a man.”

I hate to play the “you can’t understand unless you’ve been through it” card, but to properly appreciate how a bullied kid feels you really have to have been bullied in the past.  I would recommend reading through my My Bullied History series to get a better picture, but I’ll give a quick rundown of where I was mentally and socially in high school.

By high school, I had already been bullied by my teacher and the person I regarded as my best friend.  As such, I had taken a “don’t ask for help, take care of it yourself” attitude.  My classmates were by and large friendly to me, but there was a group of kids who decided that it was fun to torment me.  They would follow me from class to class shouting insults at me or laughing at me when I tried altering the route I took to avoid them.  They would get to my class before me (on the times they didn’t follow me around) and block my entrance.  While I tried to push my way through them, they would heckle me.  Every day was filled with dread over what torment they would visit upon me.

The rest of my classmates either didn’t notice this or turned a blind eye to it.  Nobody stood up and told them to stop.  In my mind, at the time, I had no allies.  It was me versus 6 guys.  Physically fighting them wasn’t an option.  They would beat me up and then make fun of me more.  Plus, I would likely get in more trouble for “starting” the fight since the bullying would be my word against theirs.

So I took it.  I absorbed every verbal blow and tried not to show the tiniest reaction.  But the reactions were there.  On trips to and from school, I would cringe as I heard kids laughing on the bus.  I was sure they were laughing at me, even when I knew they weren’t.  I don’t think I ever contemplated suicide, but I did think about violence from time to time.  But for a few changes in circumstances, I could have been one of those kids that snaps and goes violent in his school.

So, where did I go wrong according to the blog author?  My parents didn’t intervene (partly because I don’t think I told them the full extent of what was going on) and I didn’t rely on anyone other than myself.  My “do it yourself” attitude should have made me stronger.  So why did I leave high school so emotionally and socially weak?  Why do I feel the repercussions to this day when those bullies stopped being a threat to me over 15 years ago?

I suppose he would say it is because I never fought back.  Well, I did fight back against one bully.  Before the group of bullies incidents, there was a kid who began taunting me before class.  I pulled him by the hand, executed a perfect clothesline maneuver (I was a fan of wrestling back then) and he landed in a row of desks.  Guess what happened?  I got in trouble for violence and another group of bullies took his place.

Had I fought against those bullies, I’d have gotten beaten up.  Why would they stop bullying me if they knew I couldn’t physically hurt them when they were together?  They could rely on one another for support.  (When I passed just one of them in the hall by themselves, they didn’t say anything to me.)  If I landed a punch on Bully #1, Bully #’s 2 – 6 would have landed punches on me.  Who could I rely on for support?  My classmates who didn’t seem to care if I was bullied?  My parents who didn’t intervene?  My teachers who would only get involved if I got violent?  It was just isolated, socially awkward me versus the bullies.  There was no support network backing me up.

I should correct that.  There was one person.  My best friend, G, who listened to me talk of the emotional damage I had from the bullying.  He wasn’t bullied himself and so initially wrote it off as me being dramatic.  But as time went on, he began to see that I wasn’t pretending but was really hurting.  He happened to be on speaking terms with my bullies and talked with them.  Risking being targeted himself, he told them what was happening.  They (apparently) were just “having fun” and didn’t think of the consequences.  When confronted with the truth of what was really happening, they backed down.

So, in the end, my bullying problem was solved not by a big showdown in the schoolyard, not by fists flying, not by some misguided “immune system” comparison, but by a support network.  My friend was my sounding board, keeping me from going off the deep end.  He took action to stop the bullying.  If it wasn’t for him, things would have turned out a lot differently.

The real solution to bullying isn’t simple, but one big component is support.  Kids, talk to your parents.  Talk to your teachers.  I know it seems like they won’t know anything about what you’re going through, but they might surprise you.  Even if they haven’t personally experienced bullying, though, a sympathetic ear can do a world of good.  Parents/Teachers, be there for your kids/students.  Talk with them about how you can work together to solve the problem.  And to all of the kids who aren’t being bullied, keep your eyes and ears open.  If you see bullying, report it.  Anonymously, if you must, but report it.  Even better, talk to the bullied kid.  Let them know that what is happening to them is wrong and you’re there for them if they need help.  The bigger and stronger a support network that a bullied kid has, the less damage that a bully can do.

In college, all I wanted was to be "normal."  Everyone around me was dating so I wanted to date.  I had no idea how to go about this so I clumsily made my way through those four years with a solid exterior/crumbling within.  Every person holding hands, every quick kiss in the hallway, every conversation about significant others chipped away at me inside.  I had a few breakdowns, a few times when I let my crumbling exterior show, but I would erect a new "solid exterior" the first chance I got.

Fast forward to the present day.  As I posted on DadRevolution.com, NHL has been diagnosed with some behavioral issues.  We strongly believe that I share these issues.  In other words, he inherited them from me.  Add this to the growing list of "Ways I’ve Screwed Up My Son’s Life Through Genetics."  Intellectually, I know this isn’t my fault.  It’s not like I said "Hey, here’s this bad gene, let’s send that on to the baby.  Here’s a good gene, we’ll hold that back."  Still, I find myself blaming myself for all of this.

Going back to the bullying.  I always figured that it was a quirk of circumstance.  Kids bullied me and so I became an introvert and so kids bullied me more.  But what if it was the other way around?  What if I was introverted because of these behavioral issues and *THEN* kids picked up on it and bullied me?  It might seem like a small technicality, but it is huge to me.

If it was the first one, a quirk of circumstances, then NHL stands a fighting chance of not being bullied like I was.  Of not going through the living hell that I went through day after day after day.  If, instead, it is all traceable to behavioral issues, which NHL has inherited from me, I may have genetically doomed him to the same torture I encountered.  I still feel pain thinking about high school, even though I graduated 17 years ago.  How can I not feel some pain at dooming him to this same fate?

And yet, even now, I put up that solid exterior.  I’m a brick wall, able to take anything thrown at me, at least that’s how I like the world to see me… until I come crumbling down.