History is Written by the Victors

Once my friend moved away, the rest of the school year developed into a pretty consistent pattern.  During recess and other free times, I would usually get involved in violent physical altercations.  As the smallest guy in the class, I never had the advantage, regardless of being outnumbered.  The end result was that people would get hurt, usually nothing serious, just scrapes and bruises, but enough to get into trouble.  Since by that point, no amount of physical pain was going to make me cry, (or give up) the situation usually ended when someone else got hurt.  That whole not crying thing means that you never let anyone get the best of you, but there are some downsides.  You end up enduring more pain than you otherwise would have, and you are usually held responsible for the outcome, regardless of who initiated the conflict.

Since they were crying and I wasn't, for some reason the blame for the incident was nearly always placed on my shoulders.  This is completely illogical, but happens all the time in many other contexts.  The idea that "history is written by the victors" doesn't seem to be true in liberal societies.  Instead the blame for the conflict is placed on the survivors, regardless of who started it.  And once I got punished at school, I would get in trouble for the same incident when I got home, and then a similar situation would frequently develop with my younger brother.

Now I am not going to claim that I was always a completely innocent victim, especially once the pattern had developed, and habits had formed, but I absorbed far more than my share of the punishment for those situations.  I didn’t have the greatest social skills, and probably developed negative ways of getting attention, but I can’t recall a single instance where I initiated a violent response to a situation.  The same pattern played out at home with my brother, probably even to a more extreme degree.  My Mom’s perspective was that any of my brother’s negative behavior must have been learned from me.  The logical response of asking where I must have learned it from, never won me any points.

The good news is that my parents did eventually realize what was happening, and we switched schools after fourth grade.  That came about because my Dad worked nearby, so he volunteered for "yard-duty" to help supervise recess after lunch.  He was able to observe what was going on, and realized that I wasn't lying when I claimed that "I was just minding my own business when so-and-so came and ...”  That was just the way things worked there.

Going into fifth grade at a new school brought all sorts of interesting changes to my life.  I would consider that transition to be the biggest turning point in my entire life.  It took a while for some of the deeper seated issues to get resolved, but it at least put things on the right track.