This is a tale I am not proud of, but neither am I ashamed of it. You’ve heard it before from various people in similar situations with similar results.
There was a bully my age in our tiny village in Canada. He was built like a bulldozer and was gifted with the mouth of a pirate. He could let out a string of obscenities that would scare a buzzard off a shitwagon. I had to walk by him on the way to the ball park. He took a particular dislike to me and stayed up nights I guess to think up the most vile assembly of words the English language had on offer to put me down. He scared the hell out of me, though he never touched me physically. He didn’t have to. He had an aura about him that screamed danger.
If he had been a tiger and not a boy, I don’t know if I would have been any more frightened. There was always the prospect of imminent and crippling physical harm.
One night, however, the tables turned. As I walked past his place he began following me, and came right up to me screaming his invectives in my ear. I kept walking on my way to the ballpark. Then, I saw several of my older cousins coming up behind me, also heading to watch the game. They heard the commotion. What could I do?
Suddenly, the fear of being seen to be weak in front of my older cousins weighed more than the fear of having a few of my limbs torn off. I grabbed my tormentor and threw him to the ground. I jumped on top of him and started pounding like a hammermill grinding grain. He started crying, eventually, so I got up and carried on to the game.
I didn’t feel good about beating him up and his crying haunted me for a long time, but I did feel good when I realized he was never going to bother me again. And he never did. We might have even exchanged a friendly word or two over the years, I don’t remember.
What the bully had done, by instinct and following the example he had witnessed at home, was to create a grand illusion of strength and an overwhelming cloak of danger and fear that he wore with an evil grin. But when confronted, his impenetrable wall of terror fell as though made of paper.
Donald Trump has bullied people all his life. He admitted in a biography that his parents didn’t know what to do with him. They thought military school might straighten him out. As a kid he once punched a teacher in the face because he believed he was a terrible teacher. He tells that story with relish, not regret.
I am walking to my ballpark, but standing in my way is my choice of two men – Barack Obama or Donald Trump. I know which one I would choose. Obama is a man; Trump is a child. Obama would take one look at me and say, “Okay, Hagarty,. Let’s do this thing.” Trump would yell out for a posse of his bootlickers to take me out.
Fear knocked on the door. Faith answered. And there was nobody there.
©2017 Jim Hagarty
