To the Editor:

In the middle-school years, and often throughout our lives, we are afraid we won’t measure up, or that we’ll lose what status we have in the eyes of our friends, our co-workers, our peers, and those whose opinion of us we value.  Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we fail to achieve that praise and acceptance we so desperately need.

One of the easiest, laziest, and cruelest ways to bolster our own fragile self-images is to find someone to look down upon.  By diminishing them, for reasons real or imagined, we can feel ourselves elevated.  We are “better than” someone.

It’s like chickens in a yard; they too have their “pecking order,” based upon bullying.  Yes, it’s “natural”; so is a mother pig eating her young, or male lions killing cubs that might grow up to threaten them.  We are supposed to be smarter and more humane than that.

When I was little, my mother taught me that anyone who was different was a special gift in my life. Their difference meant that they had knowledge and experiences that I had never had, and I could learn wonderful things from them.  Mrs. Chang taught me how to use chopsticks, and the Norwegian family in the next block had fancy sweaters and unusual Christmas traditions.

I loved learning, but going to school really hurt a lot of the time.  I was the geeky, weird kid who was younger than everybody else in my class, and I was definitely not rich or popular.  And I wanted to be. Who doesn’t?

My solution was to turn my social “negative” into a personal “positive”; I chose to be smart with a vengeance rather than try to fit in and try to hide who I really was.  But it still hurt.  It also gave me sympathy for other people who were “outsiders,” and a commitment to trying to make the world a fairer, more accepting place.

Am I without prejudices? Not even!  I am still an arrogant intellectual twit who envies people that have more (or so I think) than I do.

But living in the Hiltowns has taught me a lot.  I know people who didn’t go as far as I did in school who are way smarter and more capable than I am, and they have been very patient with me and my failings.  Their knowledge is practical, technical, and useful, as opposed to my crossword-puzzle tricks.

I understand that it’s difficult not to make assumptions about others when there is often a distorted grain of truth underneath the stereotype.  But that stereotype stops us from ever getting to know the real, feeling, breathing, human being underneath, and we are poorer for it.

Amyah is brave.  Her experiences are forcing her to be, but it makes me wonder what kind of weaklings those bullying classmates are, that the only way they can look big is by flaunting their ignorance and insecurity.

Phyllis Johnson

Berne