Of Teachers, Social Workers, Etc.

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

When my parents got me to tell them that I wasn't eating my lunches because bullies were taking them away from me, the solution was for Dad to give me a talk about how I had to be a man and stand up to the bullies, and how when he did that when he was my age he smeared them all over the place, and that was the end of that.

I actually had enough faith in the godhood of my immediate paternal ancestor that I tried what he said try. The next time three bullies walked up to me at lunch and said I had to give my lunch to them, I said no. So they ganged up on me. A teacher broke it up. Incredibly, the fact that it was 3 on 1 meant nothing to the teacher. I got the line, "I don't care who started it." My parents were called again. The fact that the others were stealing my lunch meant nothing to the teachers. They said I should have handled it without fighting. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that teachers are a special class of human, one that never heard of truth or justice. I now know that they are not so special. For example, most social workers employed by social service agencies can also be so described.