Things I feel bad about in my youth: Bullying Kevin Swisher

Think about the names of all the people you went to grammar school with for a minute. Can you remember many of their names? Can you picture what they look like aside from a fleeing image in your head? Well I know that I can't aside from a few names here and there but there is one name that I will always remember and that is Kevin Swisher whose name I have changed slightly for the sake of not accidentally putting a story online that gets linked to someone's IG or LinkedIn profile and causes them to be eliminated for potential employment.

Kevin was just some guy that was in the same grade as me and because of the various pressures that exist in the hierarchy of social status in school he was on the receiving end of some bullying.... a lot of it actually. I am disappointed to say that the bully in this situation was none other than the normally level-headed redneck that is talking to you right now.

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Kevin and I were in 7th grade at the same time and he had the misfortune of being the ex boyfriend of a girl that became my current girlfriend at the time. Relationships at least in my world. at that age were extremely innocent. Forget about sex or even really holding hands or kissing. Your significant other was more of a status symbol than anything else when you were 11 or 12 years old in my world.

Kevin was Kelly's most recent boyfriend and much like me, his relationship with her was extremely tame. However, it was fashionable at the time I guess for you to take some sort of vengeance out on the ex of whoever your current partner happened to be at the time and I sought out Kevin the school hallways specifically for this reason. I recall beating him up basically daily for a month or so and he would take the punches and just fall down after a few of them even though my punches were very uneducated and not all that dangerous at the time.

A crowd would gather and Kevin would get popped a few times and he would go down and this would happen almost daily for a while there. Looking back I am extremely surprised that there was no intervention on the part of the teachers or even the police but I faced no repercussions at all for my actions. In fact, a few of Kevin's friends ended up getting into scraps with friends of mine purely because they were guilty by association.

It is all so stupid when I think about any of it. Kevin didn't deserve any punishment and his friends sure as hell didn't. They didn't do anything other than be friends with the guy and when I look back I am totally ashamed that I took part in this. what was our objective here? Was Kevin supposed to stop coming to school and all of his pals were supposed to write him off as a friend publicly?

This is why school shootings happen man!

I eventually got bored of punching Kevin and then when I would see him in the hallway I would give him scary eyes and he would divert his gaze and at the time I felt like a "big boy" but looking back I wish I could be current-day me in that hallway and slap the shit out of young me for being such a jerk.

Decades after this ordeal I was doing some sort of "cleaning out my closet" mentally and recalled that this had happened and while it took a long time, I did eventually track down Kevin Swisher as an adult to apologize to him for the torment that I put him through.

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He was married and had a couple of kids and barely remembered who I am. He was also extremely forgiving about it all and said that it "wasn't a big deal and to not worry about it." He immediately forgave me but I couldn't help but think of the scene pictured above where Billy Madison calls up a guy that he bullied in school and the guy says to not worry about it then puts on lipstick and scratches Billy's name off the list of "people to kill."

I think that there are a lot of people that end up traumatized by things that happen in school when they are young and I regret that I was involved in the bad end of things this one time in my life. I believe that I had a good upbringing and my parents instilled good virtues in me and this certainly was not their doing. This was me just being a jerk and seeking some sort of hallway fame at the expense of another person.

Thankfully this story has a happy ending because Kevin ended up doing quite well in life and my bullying days were very limited: I never did it to anyone else in my life other than this one time. I hope that you don't have any things like this that haunt you but I think that maybe it is a good thing that I am kept up at night thinking about how absolutely awful it was that I did this to another human being even though in the grand scheme of things it was pretty harmless. It could have been a lot worse I guess and maybe it says that I am a decent human being because I worry about it all these years later.

I'm just happy that Kevin turned out ok. I am sure there are a lot of people in a similar situation that didn't do so.