When I was in junior high school, I had an acquaintance named Joe who was mildly retarded, and a couple of grades behind. (He was a year older than I, though one grade behind me). He was of average build, whereas I was large and muscular for my age, and on several occasions, waiting for school to open, I had to intervene to keep some greaser from picking on him, just because he was obviously slow and a little weird.
Before my son began to get more normal, he got picked on in school, but he was clever, and found ways to make the bullies his friends, and sometimes protectors against others! It worked on two or three occasions, at least. In our neighborhood, I had to protect him from bullies to some extent. Once, several kids began chasing after him like a rat pack. I got him in the house, but they still hung around for a little while, occasionally bouncing a softball off of my front door. I finally went out, yelled at them, took their ball, and threw it deep in the woods. Nothing like that happened again.
There is an impulse in some (not all) people that is quite the opposite of compassion, but that delights in setting upon the weak. Fortunately, as most of these kids got older, they were socialized into more civilized behavior...... |
