Don't Hurt Me

They know what he's going through. They were in his position. They were part of the high school underclass. If only Suzie and Johnny had given them a chance, they'd realize how super-duper cool the outcasts were.

Maybe they'd even tool around town in Suzie's VW Cabriolet while blasting the Bauhaus! A beautiful mesh of two lifestyles. Jocks and freaks, side by side.

Oh, but Suzie and Johnny would never give them a chance because they're too narrow-minded to grasp how complex and awesome the outcasts are.

Please.

I had a class today in which the 23-year-old Resident Geek brought up the San Diego shooting and talked about how he had been teased for years and was friendless for just as long.

No shit.

He's the biggest prick I've ever met, and even if he had the biggest prick I'd ever met, I wouldn't be impressed.

Yes, he's fat, ugly and zit-encrusted, but the reason that no one wants to be his friend is that he's about as interesting as a 16-year-old goth chick on the morning after you fucked her.

He's spent years studying the mannerisms of Woody Allen and the personality of The Simpsons's Martin. When answering a question, he dramatically pauses, pushes his glasses up and stutters a bit.

And his answers are far more involved than they need to be, and I'm convinced that I've wasted four hours of my life waiting for him to get to the point.

This year, he started using his initials to make himself appear more professional and prickish.

The professors dislike him and try to ignore him when he raises his hand to answer a question. And these are out-there English professors who probably ate alone in their high school cafeterias.

Chances are, if everyone you encounter mocks you and dislikes you - even those with whom you feel a connection - you are the problem.

But RG doesn't factor his personality, such as it is, into the equation, and I doubt he ever will. Because it's not his fault that people don't like him. He views himself as bright and witty, and he can't fathom why others don't see him in that light.

RG and the gaggle of school shooters have something in common: they think that they're wonderful, and God or Kevlar help you if you don't.

If the newspaper reports are accurate, the 15-year-old shooter at Santana High School was a country bumpkin/wannabe pothead skateboarder who dated a 12-year-old and owned Beanie Babies. Beanie Babies.

Even potheads mocked him. Potheads.

You would have made fun of him, too.

And if you wouldn't, I doubt you would have sacrificed your life during an act of random shooting just so Andy Williams could feel better about himself.

He's not the science geek just trying to get through school so he can eventually prove the validity of cold fusion. None of the school shooters have had significant potential, which I guess is the one aspect of their existence these clinging-to-the-horrors-of-high-school whiners can relate to.

The meek shall not inherit the earth, my friends, because they're meek. Storming one's school and killing one's classmates is hardly a sign of strength. By seeking revenge, one has said that “they” win. The shooters are willing to give up their lives, either through suicide or prison time, in order to make Suzie and Johnny pay.

Never mind that if Suzie and Johnny survive, they'll get free trips to Los Angeles or New York City to appear on talk shows, have donation funds established to pay for their medical costs and maybe even write an article for Seventeen or ink a deal for an instabook about the tragedy. While the shooters are rotting in the ground or recovering in the prison's hospital ward from a wrecked rectum.

Yeah. They showed Suzie and Johnny.

If you're going to kill a few people before ending your life, at least do it with more panache and a dash of the element of surprise. We get it. Geeky white loner with access to guns equals poorly planned or executed revenge that leads to the shooter receiving more punishment than those who taunted him.

And, babylon5rockznadz@aol.com, did you stop to think that you were taunted or ignored because you're just not terribly likeable or interesting? You weren't a rebel because you wore a hachimaki and were a member of the Shire of Peoria branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism. You were a geek, and you were picked on because of it. Welcome to the harsh realm of reality, where 99.9 percent of people don't care about you or your feelings.

If you couldn't cope with 16-year-old bullies with inferiority complexes, how do you deal with the adult world?

Oh, yeah, endless hours of vampire role-playing games.

Teenagers are obnoxious shits because that's what that stage of life is about. It's about seeing how far boundaries can be pushed, dealing with the insecurities of an ever-changing body and mind, feeling out one's place in the world and all of that other psychological development bullshit -- generally a human being at its most insufferable.

Do you think teen moms are like that just because they've done birthed a baby? Of course not. They're still in their I-know-it-all-even-if-I-can't-spell-it phase, and they'd be as annoying even if they didn't have Trinity or Matrix in their lives.

If you're an adult and you don't have that perspective, it's no surprise you're using the Internet to vent your frustration toward high school students who are a distant memory -- high school students who are now adults and might actually be more interesting, more successful, more artistic and more revolutionary than you can ever hope to be. And those outcasts might now be worthless soccer moms and dads or clock-watching pencil pushers -- after all, almost everyone ultimately embraces mediocrity.

The problem isn't that kids are vicious and cliquish. That's been a given for thousands of years. And, no, the problem isn't that you were a misunderstood, unappreciated genius. You weren't.

The problem is that you were allowed to turn every minor incident into the Absolute Worst Thing That Ever Happened, Really and you weren't expected to consider your own shortcomings in how others treat you. Thus, you were left without any discernible coping skills, and you carry the battle scars of high school around with you for the rest of your miserable lives.

My generation is one of the first to almost completely lack the ability to deal with criticism and teasing - criticism and teasing that most of them probably deserved - and to respond to the criticism and teasing with righteous indignation. After all, we deserve friends, and we deserve to not have our feelings hurt.

An incident highlighting this occurred when I was in 7th grade and enrolled in a program for above-average students.

We were broken into groups to work on projects, and one of my teammates was the spoiled baby of her family. She had the ability to talk about nothing for hours on end, and even if someone stuck cotton in his ears and hummed “The National Anthem” to drown out her droning, she wouldn't catch a clue that no one was interested in how she had a major crush on Kirk Cameron when she was in 3rd grade.

I met her parents a few times, and while they were nice, they never expected her to deal with any problems on her own, and whenever she complained to them about other students teasing her, their response was, “They're just jealous of how utterly wonderful you.”

Except that we weren't.

One afternoon, she tapped my shoulder, giggled and passed me a note. "I got my period!" it read. What? When did Judy Blume start writing my life script?

I wrote back, "Who the fuck cares?"

She ran out of the classroom in tears and didn't come back for three days. And her mommy called my mommy and tried to "open a dialogue."

But I didn't hear much from her after that.

Then, there was Mucous Marcus. A dumpy kid with a lisp. He was the forerunner of today's coddled kid, and he didn't stand a chance.

While all of the other neighborhood kids walked to school, Mucous Marcus was driven to school by his mom.

When he was accidentally injured in a rousing playground game of suicide, he'd say that he'd tell his mommy and he'd sue all of us and we'd be poor! Nyah.

When it was an oppressively hot and we had to wait outside for classes to start, his mother actually sat in her car and rushed a thermos of water to him every few minutes.

Did I mention that they had a poodle named Precious?

We hated that prissy bastard.

But what sealed his fate was his mother's intense dislike of the darker persuasion. My neighborhood was Ground Zero for the ghetto chic hoping to jump into suburbia and if you were white, you had better pledge allegiance to the Zulu Nation.

Mrs. Mucous didn't grasp that. Think Prudence Pingleton in John Waters' Hairspray. Whenever she saw a darkie pass by, she pulled Mucous Marcus to her chest and told him that it would be okay. Whenever a darkie passed by as she was pulling into her driveway, she raced into the house.

She didn't understand that you dealt with living in a predominantly black neighborhood by simultaneously waving to your neighbors and stealthily locking your car door.

We didn't tease Mucous Marcus too much - there were much better targets, such as Mike “Pooper Scooper” Cooper - but his mother couldn't stand that her snookum-wookums wasn't the center of our universe. Which just spurred us to continue teasing him.

“Mucous Marcus is a big baby whose mommy still changes his diapers.”

And then, Mrs. Mucous snapped.

My friends and I were riding our bikes around the neighborhood when she ran over to me -- arms waving and spittle flying -- and pushed me off my bike.

"Stop making fun of my son! Stop it! AHHHH!!!!!" she screamed.

This was my first attendance at a nervous breakdown.

We didn't see much of Mrs. Mucous after that.

And since confession is good for the soul, there was also the case of Dwayne the Mormon.

Dwayne moved to my town from Utah. With his parents. And six brothers and sisters. Who all had names that started with “d.”

Dwayne was the Mormon embodiment of Howdy Doody, and he never passed up a chance to preach to us. And we never passed up a chance to make his life hell.

Now, I hate Mormons - unabashedly and unequivocally. This stems from an incident when I was walking around a town in New Jersey, and four wholesome-looking Mormons accosted me.

“We're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Would you like to get to know us?”

I answered, “Hmmm, you're Mormons. Well, I'm a Satan-worshipping Jew (pure redundancy, of course), so no thanks.”

“But we can go to your house and teach you all about…”

“Bye.”

I had a justified prejudice against Mormons, and when Dwayne tried to convert me, it made me want to . . . scream. If he had asked once or preached twice, I would have let it slide. But it was everyday. And with one of the smuggest attitudes I've ever seen.

I asked him to leave me alone. I asked him to tell his family to stop coming to my door, heretical Mormon bible in hand. He didn't, and they didn't.

So, I did what any other 16-year-old would do: I had him beat up.

A friend called one of the tallest, scariest, meanest kids in our grade and pretended to be Dwayne.

“I'm sick of you making fun of Mormons, and I'm sick of being Mr. Nice Guy! I'm going to kick your ass!” fake Dwayne said.

The kid fell for it. We didn't think he would, but he did. And he went to the school the next day and beat Dwayne to a bloody pulp.

We didn't hear much from Dwayne the Mormon after that.

I've run into all of these people when I've visited my hometown, and they haven't changed. What made them annoying as children has been amplified now that they're adults.

And the lesson?

Years after all of this teasing occurred, they're probably still dwelling on it. They're posting to message boards or newsgroups - maybe even e-mailing me - whining that they too were abused and that they just don't understand why. They were cool. They were hip. But no one got them. Those horrible bullies were just too ignorant to see how awesome they were. Don't you feel my pain, TMB?

But I know the truth.

Kids have always been cruel. It's the nature of the little beasts. They see your weaknesses. They see your shortcomings. They see all of your flaws, even the ones you've hidden deep inside of you. And they prey upon them.

What has changed is that no one wants to emotionally damage their children by telling them what the world really thinks about them and no one wants to tell them to suck it up -- that in the grand scheme of things, being called a nerd isn't worth dwelling on, and hey, maybe you even asked for it.

What would you rather be, Colby, an American nerd with a shitty personality (and access to downloadable porn) or a malnourished African with AIDS, cholera and sickle-cell anemia?

So, stop sending e-mails to me about how you feel the pain of these poor, tortured souls. If you're over the age of 18 and still dwell on the time 15-year-old Tommy Hunkerson cruelly pointed out the period stain on the back of your white K-mart jeans, I think I know why no one wanted to be your lab partner in 10th grade biology.

Providing jack-off material for white misogynists since 1997.

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