Straight up, unfiltered, pure grade sociopaths…
We try to sanitise youth with cartoon dogs and participation trophies, but a school playground is the equivalent of Mad Max’s Thunderdome…
Except it’s covered in woodchips and sticky juice box residue and snot and all the gross things that make kids, kids.
I remember Toby.
Toby had four fingers on his left hand. His thumb was just a phantom limb. The space where it should have been was smoothed over, looking like a half kneaded ball of raw pizza dough. The other kids? Fucking piranhas in light up sneakers. They treated him like he was patient zero.
They wouldn’t touch the ball if he threw it, acting as if his missing digit was contagious.
They called him “High Four” treating his hand like some unsettling body horror rather than a regular birth defect that can happen.
They proved that character driven conflict usually stems from humans being morally ambiguous or in this case, just straight up evil.
But I sat with him.
Why?
Maybe I was lonely, who knows? Maybe I possessed that rare, dangerous mutation called empathy.
We ate your bruised apples and soggy sandwiches together in the splash zone of everyone else’s disdain, trading snacks and ignoring the whispers. It was a brief, beautiful defiance against the hive mind that makes school just regular ol’ school.
Then came the blood poisoning.
Sepsis. A creeping, microscopic rot invading his veins.
He got sick.
He turned grey.
He died.
Just like that. A random, stupid Tuesday, and Toby was just gone. Erased from everything.
His death didn’t magically make those kids better. There was no cinematic moment of redemption. It didn’t teach them a damn thing about kindness. It just taught them that they could survive being cruel. It taught them that the weak disappear and the vicious get to keep playing four square and other school related bullshit.
Fast forward a few years.
We’re adults now. And when you look around…
Those evil little bastards didn’t go away. They just grew up. They got mortgages. They got LinkedIn profiles. They got elected to public office and put in charge of HR departments and all of the other miserable roles currently floating about in society.
Funny thing is. The bullies didn’t disappear. Instead of it just being the school yard, it’s become the whole globe, which also happens to include the internet, where we spend a lot of our time…
Mad that we are watching the world turn into that exact same lunchroom, day by day, tweet by tweet etc.
Will it get worse? Obviously.
Although. We’re running out of tables to hide under and that’s all just so exhausting, but if you can. Just be a little more empathic to what’s going on in the world. Whether or not it affects you or not. Remember, it affects others and if we can brighten up someone else’s day…
That’s the little bit of magic we’re missing in this already darkening world.
Stephen Walker.