I kicked a boy
On the futility of trying to show others what's what
When the weather’s fine, when it’s sunny outside
Think about the time I kicked a boy till he cried.
I’ve been watching the behavior of MAGA now that their guys are in power, and it becomes clearer and clearer what this is all about. High-minded people call it grievance politics, but a nonsensical phrase from my childhood keeps running through my head: “I’m going to show them what’s what.”
That is a phrase I associated in my youth with angry, entitled boys who were about to go initiate a fight with another boy. These days, that phrase’s emptiness and imperviousness to inspection would serve just as well as the rallying cry for guys1 who think it’s about time they got to kick a girl till she cries.
I did kick a boy
When I started junior high school (7th grade in my town) I went from walking to a school near home where I knew everyone to busing to a school in another neighborhood that was full of strangers. For a shy girl, too smart and prepubescent, it was a traumatic move. On the first day of class, my math teacher mocked me for my weird name.2 My best friend moved out of state. None of this is an excuse, it just sets the stage.
I did make a couple of friends. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember which two girls they were, which is probably for the best. I also started to notice boys and wonder if they noticed me. Most of all I noticed a small boy who had the most beautiful green eyes. I was still tall for my age (how the universe was about to laugh at me as I stopped growing and everyone else shot up), but I didn’t mind that he was short.
One day I was with the two girls, probably after school let out, and we spied the boy down an empty hall. “Let’s go kick him!” one of the girls urged. I’d like to say that I went along with hesitation, but all I remember thinking is, “OK, this is what you do to make friends.” We ran up to him and each one of us gave him a feeble kick, then ran away laughing. And that was it, no consequences, and it was never discussed again. We showed him what’s what, but which what it was remains opaque to me.
Oh, I could’ve been wrong, but I don’t think I was
He’s such a child
I didn’t know anything
I’ll start here with the disclaimer that I fully respect women who don’t have children and don’t think that a woman’s life must include mothering. But I will also say that I haven’t met a woman who wasn’t fundamentally changed by mothering—for better and for worse. In my case, I look back at my many pre-mothering years and think, “Wow, I was just so stupid.”
Of course I wasn’t stupid about everything: Before I had kids my brain was much more capable at remembering facts, dates, and dollar amounts. (Now it sends pretty much all trivia to the garbage can without a single regret. That’s what “hey google” is for!) I was much more knowledgeable about popular culture. (Now I have simply given up. Bad What? Taylor Who?) I could speak in full sentences without a stray thought grabbing me mid-sentence and sending me in a whole new direction or even worse, stuttering pathetically while I try to conjoin two seemingly unrelated ideas so another human being can understand.
That said, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what it was like to hear someone cry and feel my heart cry in response. I didn’t know how another person could be so much a part of my being yet be a separate person with their own inner life. I didn’t truly understand that we all use our inner lives to narrate our actions and make sense out of them.
We all make sense out of our actions even though some of them, like kicking a small, green-eyed boy in an empty hallway, are so senseless.
Why did I do that? Why do they do that?
Human beings are not born wise—we’re born as sponges. And we’re not born as leaders—we’re born as a dependent part of a collective. What happens to us from before birth through the rest of our lives interacts with our biology to shape us. I kicked that boy because I wanted to belong, because he was small and vulnerable, and because there was no one there to watch. My kick expressed all sorts of unexamined hurts and vulnerabilities that I wouldn’t be able even to glimpse until I was in middle age. And now that I am so far away from that hallway, I can still hear the echoes, I can still smell the funk of teen bodies, and I can still see the look of utter amazement in that boy’s beautiful eyes.
The kicker often doesn’t know why she kicks
Raising a child with developmental issues taught me that you can really never know another person’s intentions from the outside. And raising kids taught me that even fully functional adults such as I’d been pre-mothering may have absolutely no clue what their own intentions are. I haven’t done much that’s particularly bad—a good dose of Catholic guilt goes a long way toward enforcing decent behavior—but I couldn’t have articulated why I didn’t do anything particularly bad, and even more, why I did the wrong things that I did.
That’s why when I mothered and taught children with unusual behaviors, sussing out their intentions fascinated me. I’d noticed that other adults often seemed to assign very wrong intentions to the kids’ behaviors. When a friendless child in kindergarten pushes another child, for example, we call that “bullying” and we assume that the pusher wanted to hurt that child. But at least one child I knew expressed their desire to befriend another person by physically engaging in highly inappropriate ways: pushing a kid they liked, poking at toddlers that they found fascinating.
I really liked that green-eyed boy, and though my friends and I, to my memory, never talked about the episode again, it haunted me. In my very warped early-teen memory, the boy just disappears from the school, but that look lingers. Most likely, he grew up as we all did, and went off to a functional adult life like most of us do, but in my mind, he remained that small, astonished boy. And the reason why I kicked him? For many years it remained a mystery to me.
And I've been wondering lately, "Just who's gonna save me?"
When meanness isn’t really meanness
I guess that day branded me a “mean girl,” but I don’t remember being particularly mean to other kids after that. Mostly I tried to disappear so that no one would notice me, which completely failed because I was so disappointingly not transparent (especially to mocking teachers). The last time I visited my hometown as an adult, a woman approached me and reminded me we’d been in school together until I abruptly dropped out and left town. She said she had a vivid memory of me as “that kid who would come to the first day of Sunday school and never return.” I totally don’t remember that. Sorry, God, I didn’t mean to ghost you. At least some of your lessons stuck.
I don’t think I’m a particularly “good” person, but at the very least I can now identify my own inner stories and when those stories are lies. I wonder why so many adults now seem less able than ever to understand their own inner stories. MAGA’s inner stories mystify me—do they tell themselves lies that help them justify supporting bullies? They must be lying to themselves, because their leaders kick them hard every time they come upon them in a metaphorical empty hallway. I try to believe that politics-of-grievance thing because I know it’s wrong to assign a conscious intent of meanness to the core MAGA voters. But this explanation, that they believed the lies about “getting rid of the bad people” and “rebuilding our manufacturing sector” and “bringing down the cost of groceries,” is clearly facetious: hardcore MAGA didn’t need those lies. They like the mean boy bully, and they wanted him back.
It’s clear that they simply like the mean boy because (to no one’s surprise, probably including hardcore MAGA) none of those promises have come true. Even if you are a complete idiot, which most MAGA voters aren’t, you can see that a little boy in bunny ears and his loving daddy who picks him up at school are not the bad people. Even if you are sucked into the Fox News alternative dimension, you can see that the factories are shuttered and pretty much everything you order from Amazon.com is made in China. Even if you don’t do the shopping in your house, I think it highly unlikely that you haven’t noticed you can’t afford groceries any more than you could a year ago. So what inner story do you have to tell to continue supporting this gang of rogues?
It’s clear to me that a whole lot of people who used to be decent have become something else. Their inner stories have been twisted by opportunistic thieves who tell them that kicking another kid will make them—what? Wealthier, more popular, more important? Americans used to be mocked by Europeans for our sunny, optimistic attitude and our naive gullibility. And Brits, at least, were amazed at how our politicians even knew what the word “comity” meant. But all of that is gone. In a generation, we’ve gone from the kid who’d feel bad about kicking a little boy to the man dressed in battle gear who pushes a woman onto an icy sidewalk just to show her what’s what.
You just should’ve been wise
Oh, hysterical child
Where’d you learn to do that?
Have they figured out what’s what yet?
We’re a year into this mess and they’ve really shown us… what?
They’ve fired the scientists,
they’ve cowed the teachers,
they’re working on killing the women (especially brown ones),
they’ve taken celebrations of over half of America out of our national museums,
they’re making our kids less able to fight off diseases,
they’ve made us learn how to pay tariff bills that we get from UPS,
they’re bankrupting our universities,
they’ve fired thousands of our faithful public servants,
they’re charging many of them with crimes so ludicrous they can’t find a grand jury to indict them,
they’re shooting people who don’t like military occupation in their city,
they’re taking away our restaurant owners, gardeners, and the people who care for our beloved old folks,
they’re destroying the infrastructure that we were finally building back up again,
they’re encouraging companies to go back to their wasteful, polluting ways, as if our environmental rules hadn’t clearly improved the lives of every single one of us,
and they’re weakening our trust in all of the systems that survived so many tests but might not survive this one.
We’re a year into this mess and they’ve actually gotten… what from that gang they elected?
The infrastructure projects that were developing good jobs have been canceled,
the school programs their kids depended on have been canceled or weakened,
the healthcare that was so hard-won for working folks is going away,
the drug addiction programs that saved some of their people are gone,
the free healthcare their teens and expectant mothers got is gone because the clinics have been run out of their states by misogynistic mystics who think that prayer can cure disease,
the industries that employ them are teetering due to tariffs and the sudden open field for China to take over markets in countries we now distance ourselves from,
and let’s not forget: their taxes are not any lower.
In fact, the worse our public health gets, the worse our environment gets, the more isolated from the rest of the world we get, the more we will be taxed to keep things going.
When a person doesn’t have health insurance, does MAGA know who pays? We pay.
When a hundred more kids have asthma because no one stops the factory from polluting anymore, do they know who pays? We pay.
And when the feds decide that natural disasters—as Californians have been told—are payback for our sinful behavior, do they know who pays? We all pay.
Yes, MAGA, you will pay for a devastating wildfire in Silicon Valley’s backyard. We all pay. That’s how it works. It may not show up as income tax, but in one way or another, the tax will be extracted from you.
What the heck is this what?
So what what have they actually shown us? That they can gang up on people who are smaller and less powerful than they are and kick them? That they are big men who can kick a girl with impunity and get congratulated by their favorite muscular podcaster? That everything their Lord and Savior said, all that wisdom I was supposed to be studying in Sunday school but apparently skipped, was just another load of BS?
Well, all I can think when I wonder what what MAGA has shown us is that in fact, they have indeed shown us what’s what. That phrase’s emptiness and imperviousness to inspection perfectly describes what their strutting lord and savior has done to this country, and perfectly describes what they have received in return. The inner story they are telling themselves is devoid of intention and plot, devoid of justification—it’s just empty crowing that makes them feel like big men standing over a quaking child in an empty hallway.
I can only hope that one day these mean adults dominating our cultural life think back to that day when they kicked a sweet, small, green-eyed boy, and suddenly they realize, I didn’t know anything. I hope they realize that we all have our own inner lives, which narrate our actions and try to make sense out of them, and I hope they realize that their inner voice has been muzzled by lies. And I hope they write a letter to that green-eyed boy telling him that wherever he is, however he has survived the cruelty of prepubescent kids who just wanted some friends, they didn’t mean it. That in fact they have realized now that they didn’t know at all what they were doing.
Because sometimes when you push someone down, what you’re really looking for is a friend.
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I generally use “guys” as a gender-neutral term, but in this case they mostly are guys.
I don’t believe in holding grudges, but now that I’m a teacher, I understand what damage Mrs. Swayze of Jefferson Junior High School did to her students. I don’t know what long-ago hurt led her to set herself up as the authoritarian ruler of her little kingdom but I do know this: She sure taught us what’s what. Also, what a pain that I went by the formal “Susana” for years after that, fearful of reclaiming my beloved childhood nickname.
Makes me cry
I hope you've written a letter that apologizes to that green-eyed boy.
I wish we didn't all have to suffer at the moment Earth turns on these big men to show them what's what.