Completely in the Dark

Odd that just the other day President Obama held a conference at the White House on bullying, because that was the very topic of my next post.

At the conference the president said, “If there’s one goal [of the conference], it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage.”

The POTUS even confessed to his own tussles. “With big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune. I didn’t emerge unscathed.”

Let’s step back to 1970­–72, after we’d just moved to Minnesota, and look at my history as a victim of bullying, since little is said of it in the journals of 1973–74.

Although I didn’t write about it at the time, a lot comes back clearly—too clearly actually—when I think of that locus, that inner circle of hell where bullying freely consorts with the demons and the damned—