Bullies

Bullies. It is a term that everyone knows well. Most would say that they have been a victim, yet few will ever admit to being a bully. When I was younger, and I was bullied, people would often say that it was a "young peoples" thing and that as people grow up, they grow out off being bullied or being a bully. I am here to say that although this might seem to be the norm, there have been few times in my life that I have not felt bullied by co-workers, employees and sometimes those that are under me with threats of lawsuits or reprocussions.



I have never really been one of the "cool kids" and as an adult, I am still not there. I guesss that my having no desire to conform really has upset people for almost 3 decades. I always just wanted to be me, and calling others on being " just like everyone else" tends to get them a little edged. When I was younger, I often got picked on because I had a smart mouth. As I look back on things, I wonder if the opposite was true. I wonder if my mouth was my only defense, so I developed a smart mouth because I was getting picked on. I was small and an easy target, so I guess that it is hard to blame the bigger, more insecure kids that had no self esteem and decided that picking on me was an ideal way to make them seem better in the eyes of their friends.



There was one incident, that many have heard about, when I was tied up to a chain link fence at school and had my panyts pulled down in front of about 50+ of my peers. As if this were not enough, one student climbed up above me and dropped pebbles on my head. Many thought this was pretty funny, yet for a skinny 89 lb freshman, it was one of the most devistaing things of my life. It took me years to process the pain that I carried around for may years. In fact, I was deathly scared of one of the parties involved to where 20 years later, just the sound of his voice almost made me piss my pants. But unfortunatly, bullies are still in my life to this day.



Last year, there was a bully in my life that seemed to have the same motives as when I was younger. I was not like him and refused to conform to the way he and some of the others I was around acted. It reached a point  to where he gathered a group of people together to "corner" me and do what I can only call "verbal rape". They all stood there and allowed a few chosen people to tell me how horrible of a person I was and how they were repulsed by my humor and actions. Some of those people near by were people cheating on thier sposes, lying to thier spouses, drunks and a few others that had little or no integrity at all. My biggest sin was that I never condoned thier actions and let them know through my actions and speech that I was a man of integrity. This one man went as far as to make some suggestions that my physical body may be in danger if I ever chose to cross him. The result was the rest of my time around him fearing that I might upset him in some way and knowing that he had a kind of power over me that was unhealthy.  Although things eventually got better, just feeling that fear at being around someone and knowing that there was little I could do about it was defeating.  


Why do people bully?  

First Blog

I don't think I am much of a blogger.... more of a rambler, so I will ramble and see what comes out.  Even though it did not seem as if the time change was going to effect Kyra much, it was a little more difficult to get her down tonight.  This is partly because of the time change and partly because she has recently learned how to sit up, yet has not quite master the feat of laying back down.  A THUNK is usually the outcome and she has not yet realized that falling over in the crib is not near as bad as falling over on the living room floor.  So, the result is us putting her down, her sitting up, playing, then getting mad because she wants to lay down, yet does not want to fall down.  Melissa would go in there, lay her back down, cover her back up and kiss her goodnight.  5 minutes later, the cycle repeated.  Lis did this 2 or 3 times before she finally stayed down.  Success.

I am getting anxious to go back to work.  It has been 5 months and I have a little over a month to go till I can start my training again, hopefully complete a few of my taskbooks and open a few more so that I might further my career and make myself more valuable to the USDA Forest Service.  The crew has gone from 14 down to 10 and possibly even down to 9 this year.  This means that I will really need to step up, take more responsibility and possibly get more one-on-one training out on the fireline, on the Helitender, or on the helicopter.  It looks like I will get to drive the Helitender this year and be plugged in to some pretty key situations to getr where I want to go.  It really scares my dear ol mother for me to be up in a helicopter, yet for one of the first times in a long time, I am really enjoying the work that I am doing and feel that the Lord really has a plan for the next coming years and I am pretty jazzed about that.

So how about that for a first post? I am sure that I will come up with some far more interesting subjects, yet I just wanted to get some things down to see how it would look on the page.  Pretty silly, eh?