Cruel Summer

In fifth grade, I was the target of severe bullying. What started as a single student making unkind remarks, built through the school year to a nearly class-wide campaign of intimidation, death threats, silent complicity, and social ostracism. A threatening note in my desk. A friend switching seats across the class to not be seen with me. The spike of a math-class compass brandished at my neck.

So I recognize, with visceral disgust, the cruelty of our current moment. I see that 11 year old with a compass, the sweaty thrill of violence on his face, when conservative public figures mock the assassination of a democratic state legislator. I see the the self-satisfied scrawl on a torn sheet of notebook paper telling me “you’re gonna die” when I come across t-shirts proudly celebrating the opening of a prison camp in the Everglades, with gleeful promises of inhumane conditions and a disregard for due process. I hear echoes of playground chants about not having the right shoes when Republican Senators cheer passage of a bill that will give tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy in exchange for, among other things, taking food subsidies away from poor children. I feel the sting of the hissed “fag” from across the lunch table when I read that federal funding has been pulled from a LGBTQ teen suicide hotline. I recognize my own careful, silent retreats from the classroom when I gently ask a housekeeper friend about ICE raids in her community and her usually sparkling eyes go dead.

We are being governed by bullies.

Living in Los Angeles these last few months has been a particularly insistent reminder of how bullying tactics can be used on a massive scale. The military rolled onto our streets with the hardware of war to quell so-called riots. LA knows what a riot looks like; these were not riots. But it was an opportunity to show force and intimidate, and weeks later the troops remain with nothing to do, I suppose, but shop at The Grove or check out the Walk of Fame. Meanwhile, masked and often unmarked ICE agents sweep into farmers markets, car washes, and even people’s cars, children in the backseat, to forcibly pull citizens and non-citizens alike from their lives. Recently, a beloved ice cream seller in our neighborhood, a man who had been in our community for 20 years, was accosted in the park and disappeared into the system. His abandoned ice cream cart has become a symbol of the cruelty and fear mongering of this regime and the way these policies have pushed people indoors, into hiding. “Give me your ice cream money, twerp.”

And the thing is, instead of doing the hard police work of finding the few real criminals and gang members in this country illegally, they are rounding up easy to grab quota fillers, people simply trying to feed their families and contribute to their communities, some even following the rules of our system to the letter only to be grabbed at their next immigration hearing. Instead of doing the difficult political work of allocating money to and reforming an overtaxed, broken immigration system, they shovel more money into “enforcement” while dehumanizing everyone with a tattoo or an accent or a different gender identity to justify their raids. This is what bullies do; they use threats to avoid dealing with their own failings, their own responsibilities.

Why do they do it? I could look to the stats about bullies being victims of abuse themselves and link it up to endless cries of victimization—the Kennedy Center doesn’t love me, I can’t make that joke at the office, that woman is getting paid almost as much as me. As some wrap themselves in a strange drag-like masculinity (flack jackets and AK-47s brandished at the local Home Depot to round up people without weapons) and as they use second-rate mafioso shakedown techniques on everyone from major universities to dishwashers, I know that it is an attempt to project power, to feel important, when they are terrified of a world that is changing in ways none of us can completely fathom.

So pick on the little one. The fifth grader who is six inches shorter than everyone else. The little boy who prefers to play with girls and likes to talk to the teachers on the playground. The kid who gets really good grades and maybe makes you feel a little dumb, though he certainly never thought that. Pick on him. Scare him. Do you feel better now? Do you feel powerful now?  Do you? This may be the way to rule a playground but it isn’t the way to run a country, not the country that professes at its best to be about liberty and justice for all, "all" meaning even that little gay boy you don’t much like, too.

And, ultimately, I don’t really care about the why. Not right now. I care about the “what next.” The creep of cruelty is oozing across our landscape and infecting our institutions, our society, our neighborhoods, ourselves. And we will all pay the price if we don’t speak up and say we are better than this. Because, when you see that little boy being cornered in the classroom—or being shoved to the ground at a protest, or perhaps even being taken to an internment camp—will you stand up and intervene or will you slide your chair just far enough across the classroom to where you can pretend you don’t see what’s happening?

Painting: “Summer of Ice” by Lalo Alcaraz https://lalo-alcaraz-art-shop.myshopify.com/collections/prints-by-lalo-alcaraz/products/summer-of-ice-by-lalo-alcaraz-artistic-satin-poster