When I was ten years old, I did something I’ve always regretted and never fully understood.
At dusk on a Saturday in October, I trudged down the alley behind my house clutching a pair of heavy channel-lock pliers hidden in the front pocket of my black sweatshirt. As I passed the halfway point in the alley, I glanced over my shoulder to be sure no one was following me.
When I got to a small white house with flaking paint and a weedy overgrown lawn at the end of the block, I checked again. No one around. I walked up to the sagging garage door and peered inside. No lights, an oil-stained concrete floor, an old green Ford Fairlane, a few scattered tools on a bench, and a red bike.
I had never been in this garage before, but I knew it was Billy’s, and the red bike confirmed that. The bike was newer than anything else in the garage and it was my target. I pulled the pliers from my pocket and opened the big jaws. Fastening them around several of the shiny chrome spokes on the back wheel of the bike, I yanked and twisted until the mangled spokes pulled away from the hub. I did it again on the front wheel. And then I ran.
It was a mean-spirited and cowardly act of revenge aimed at a kid who happened to live at the “wrong” end of the block. Maybe Billy had insulted one of us at the “right” end of the block. Maybe he had just looked at us wrong. Maybe he had a few choice words for us. I really don’t remember what his crime was. But some small provocation, probably combined with a desire to prove allegiance to my end of the block, led me to wreck Billy’s new bike that night.
I lost track of Billy when he disappeared a few years later, apparently dropping out of high school. But that one senseless act of mine, however minor it might seem in the context of today’s polarized and hate-stained world, stays with me. For me it was a deliberate choice, something that I caused to happen. For Billy, it was something that happened to him. Did it contribute to anger, bitterness, or a sense of powerlessness in his developing personality? Or maybe a feeling of failure as a member of our little community? Could it have been a part, however indirect, of his decision to become a high school dropout? I’ll probably never know.
The choices we make every day, big or small, good or bad, affect the lives of people in our present and future. We never know about most of these impacts because they extend into the future well beyond our lifetimes, affecting people who influence others, who then continue the process with others, forming a branching tree of change. Sometimes we all feel small and powerless, but we are powerful beyond imagining.
Looking back, I wish I had chosen kindness and friendship over ignorance and hate. This kind of meanness was not the norm for me — I had never done anything like this before and haven’t since — but in that moment I acted on something real inside me. I even felt oddly righteous. I was not forced to do it. No one dared me to do it. No one even suggested it. I just did it. Why?
I can only speculate from my vantage point nearly sixty years later. I don’t think that I, or anyone else at my end of the block, felt threatened by this kid. I don’t think that Billy had ever done any physical harm to any of us or our property. I do think that he felt looked-down-upon by us and, sadly, he was right about that. As a result, he probably said some things we interpreted as aggressive or mean.
Billy’s family was struggling financially; his house and yard showed it. My family, like others at our end of the block, was financially stable, not wealthy by any means, but we had all we needed. Billy lived at the other end of the block, and even that small separation seemed to amplify our differences. Another kid in a similar situation lived just across the street from Billy and neither kid was doing well in school. I don’t remember ever seeing Billy’s parents around, and it never occurred to me that he might need help, or at very least a friend.
This was my first personal “us vs. them” experience and I haven’t been a direct participant in anything like it since, at least not in such an obvious way. But I’ve participated in more subtle yet still destructive ways: like staying silent after hearing a class-related, racist, homophobic, or misogynistic comment or joke; like repeating a rumor; like making assumptions about someone’s intentions based purely on race or appearance.
Dr. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton (UC Berkeley), like many other researchers, has pointed out that humans are exceptionally adept at making distinctions. We are naturally quick to identify someone either as one of “us” or one of “them.” This ability makes our world simpler to navigate: we don’t have to think as hard about who to trust and who not to trust. We can make faster decisions, and in our primitive past, speed often meant survival. But of course our ability to distinguish, coupled with our tendency to generalize, also leads us directly into racism, misogynism, homophobia and other maladies. It leads us into hate.
But we aren’t powerless victims of evolution. We can change. Mendoza-Denton points out that one of the most effective and powerful ways to do that is through personal relationships:
“Familiarity breeds liking. The more often and consistently people experience one another through inter-group contact, the less likely they are to be influenced by stereotypes and prejudices. Some of our prejudices arise simply because we don’t have experience with other groups. We never have the chance to disconfirm our faulty stereotypes.”
I hope to follow this advice more consistently in the coming weeks and months. I only wish I could go back and convince my ten year-old self to do the same.