Robert Reich has inspired so many of us with his dedication to public service, to teaching, and to writing, including posts on Substack. In all of these endeavors, he has shed light on and inveighed against the inequities in our political and economic system.
A leitmotif throughout his career has been his work on behalf of those who have been bullied.
Reich himself was bullied as a child, as he has discussed in posts, in The Last Class, a documentary film playing in the theaters, and now in his memoir, Coming up Short, which is set to be released on Aug. 5.
According to stopbullying.gov, 19.2% of students aged 12-18 experienced bullying in our country during the 2021-22 school year.
Bullying, unfortunately, can also occur even when kids are younger than 12.
We all know that the brains of children and teens are not fully developed from a neurological perspective. Not surprisingly, young people often do not have the empathy, the executive function or the impulse control that adults might have.
Still, kids, like adults, know the difference between right and wrong, a point I made in my March 2021 piece for Thrive Global, “Celebrating my Jubilee 50 Years after my Kindergarten Trauma.”
Yes, we all know the difference between right and wrong, and we are all flawed.
A former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, Reich may be one of those rare examples of a person, who has always stood up to bullies.
Not all of us perhaps have been quite as fierce or as stalwart in doing so, and some of us have even at times been bullies as well as bullied.
In May 2014, I wrote a piece, “Bully Avengers Patrol the Schools of L.A.,” for the HuffPost about a 2011 film short, Bully Avengers.
The director and co-screenwriter Myiea Coy showed the film to kids in schools in the Los Angeles area.
Coy, whose daughter was being bullied at the time, told me that she herself had been a bully when she was younger.
When Coy and Kelly Howard, her husband, showed the film in schools, there would often be an extraordinary moment, where kids would walk up to other kids and apologize to them in front of everyone at the school.
I was thinking about this recently, as Reich’s book is being published, because there are times when we all wish that we could apologize to someone, perhaps someone from our childhoods.
In 1968, my family moved into our first home in the Spring Glen section of Hamden, Conn., a suburb of New Haven.
I was a little kid, not quite 3 years old, when we moved from our apartment just west of Prospect Street, close to Dixwell-Newhallville, viewed by some as a ghetto, in New Haven.
As a little boy in New Haven, I had friends from my neighborhood, who were white and others who were Black, kids who played with me in our plastic pool, among other activities.
Moving to Spring Glen in 1968, a few months after Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated and right around the time of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, we were not the only Jewish family on our block. But the neighborhood was almost entirely white and primarily Catholic.
Robert Reich has written about how his family was mistreated after they moved from Scranton, Pa., to South Salem, NY, when Reich was a little boy, not long after World War II.
I did not have the same circumstances in the late 1960s, when my family moved to Hamden, Conn.
But it is true that there were some anti-Semites in our neighborhood.
My mother wanted me to go to the nearby church for nursery school, but she was told that we were not wanted there.
We were also not invited to join High Lane, the local pool and tennis club, about a block away from our home on Ridgewood Ave.
A year or two later, a Gentile family who moved in next door was invited to join the High Lane Club.
Our neighbors had a last name that sounded Germanic, though they may very well have been of Scandinavian, not German, descent.
I can recall times when Bill, my younger brother, and I went over to this neighbor’s home and played upstairs as well as in the backyard, which, like ours, sloped somewhat.
Our neighbor, whose name was Johnny, was about Bill’s age, three or so years younger than I.
For a few years, we were all friends, Bill, Johnny and I.
Back then, there were many places to explore on our abutting properties.
There were a series of trees, tall trees, in Johnny’s backyard, and we sometimes climbed those trees in what seemed to us to be a mini forest. We even once found a so-called Indian Buffalo nickel in the ground.
We also had a slide and sandbox and jungle gym in our backyard, as well as a secret passageway that led behind another neighbor’s yard and down to a brook that wended its way over to the glen across the street, from which the neighborhood, Spring Glen, took its name.
In October 1971, when I was in first grade, we celebrated my 6th birthday at our home in Hamden. Johnny and other kids from my neighborhood were there, as I recall.
It was at this birthday party that a boy, whom I will call Dick, came to my home for the first time.
He had been my supposed best friend in kindergarten, and at times he had stood up for me when Mrs. Crawley, our kindergarten teacher, an anti-Semite, began to stick me in the “dunce corner,” as I have written before.
Why did she do this?
Mrs. Crawley was hateful. She was also furious that I, a little boy, could already read.
As I have discussed before in articles for Thrive Global, I was helping the other kids in my K class learn how to read, which Mrs. Crawley initially asked me to do.
I had embraced the assignment, but apparently I was teaching the other kids, including Dick and the other boys in the back row, so well that Mrs. Crawley turned against me and punished me with trips to the “dunce corner.”
My mother, a former schoolteacher in the Hamden school district, had taught me to read when I turned 3 years old in October 1968, several months after we moved to our home on Ridgewood Ave. in Hamden.
There I was helping the other kids learn how to read during the first month or so of school in the fall of 1970 at Spring Glen School, which, as I have noted before, was being renovated, so that the classes that year were held at Mishkan Israel, a synagogue that my family would later join.
When my parents took me to Providence, R.I., where my grandparents lived, for the Jewish High Holy Days, I missed several days of school right around my birthday in 1970.
That was the excuse that Mrs. Crawley used to single me out for abuse and to stick me in the “dunce corner,” where I was forced to hunch for roughly an hour a day just about every school day for roughly the next eight months.
I have, as I say, written about this subject before in articles for Thrive Global, beginning with “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from Kindergarten,” a piece that I wrote in November 2018.
But I have not written as much about the evil of Dick, who claimed that he was my best friend, who had witnessed the evil of Mrs. Crawley, and who then turned on me because he was hateful and anti-Semitic, too. He was also jealous of me, perhaps not unlike Mrs. Crawley, and he systematically undermined me starting in first grade.
The Bobo the Doll experiments had taken place not long before I began kindergarten.
Like one of the kids who observes the experiment, in which an adult beats a doll or toy clown, Dick, after seeing Mrs. Crawley physically and spiritually assault me, “made love” to the evil that he had witnessed, as Hamlet says of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his treacherous friends.
Tragically, Dick set out to ruin me, including in my own neighborhood, on my block on Ridgewood Ave in Spring Glen.
Dick tried to destroy my friendships with other kids, such as Michael Raith, a boy in my class, who was from Germany, as well as Johnny, my friend from our neighborhood, who again had a German-sounding last name.
Dick told me that I should hate Michael Raith, a very bright classmate, and Johnny, a nice kid and gifted athlete. Dick used an anti-German epithet to describe Michael and Johnny.
I told my dad what Dick and some other kids were saying about Michael Raith and Johnny; my dad then told me never to call Michael or Johnny or anyone else by any anti-German epithet.
I honored what my dad said.
In the course of attempting to subvert my friendships, Dick hurt other people, too, like Michael Raith and Johnny, kids with Germanic surnames, even if they might not necessarily realize this.
Dick also lied to me and tried to poison my mind about a friend of mine, who was of French descent named Brian; and Dick likewise badmouthed another boy, who liked me, named Bob, who was Irish.
In addition, Dick and others were vicious to a friend of mine named Bernie, who was Puerto Rican, because Bernie went out of his way to stand up for me when Dick lied and told everyone that I was gay, a term that I did not even understand as a boy.
Egged on by Dick, I actually ended up getting into fights with Brian and Bob, and Bernie suffered horribly because he stood up for me.
I apologized to Brian, Bob and Bernie in a piece for Thrive Global in January 2021, “Public School, Trauma and Healing.”
Now, I would like to apologize to Johnny.
Like Robert Reich, I was the smallest and perhaps the skinniest boy in my class for years.
I did not reach 5 feet until I was in 9th grade.
And I did not clear 100 pounds until midway through 10th grade.
When I was in elementary school, we played a game at recess called “Kill the Kid with the Ball,” a horrific name for a somewhat innocuous sport, in which we would chase the kid who had the ball and try to tackle him.
It was a little bit like rugby in which the kid with the ball could toss it to someone else, who would then run with it and try to ward off tacklers before flipping the ball to another party.
I never played tackle football; my father and mother wisely would not allow it.
But I did play “Kill the Kid with the Ball” on the athletic field at Spring Glen School when I was a little boy, beginning in 1971 when I started first grade.
One day, in the 1970s, we were playing “Kill the Kid with the Ball” at Johnny’s house in his front yard on Ridgewood Ave.
Johnny had the ball, and I chased him, then tackled him.
Unbeknownst to me, I may have injured or possibly broken Johnny’s arm, something that I never knew until my mother told me years later.
I was shocked and remain so.
I am very sorry that I hurt Johnny, and I certainly did not intend this at all.
As I say, I had no idea at the time that I may have hurt him.
More importantly, I am also very sorry that I did not stop other kids in the neighborhood from bullying Johnny.
There were a few boys on the block who used to hurt him, and I could have stopped it.
I did stop other crises from taking place or from escalating, such as when I told my father about a problem that almost occurred one day when some kids and even some adults in the neighborhood intended to ostracize Johnny’s family because they were of a Germanic background.
My father came outside and put an end to what could have been an ugly scene between some other parents.
Again, I am very sorry that I stood around and did not stop a few boys from hurting Johnny when we were young.
I hope that Johnny can accept my apology.
He was a friend of mine when we were very, very little.
And he did nothing wrong.
He was a gentle, sandy-haired boy, who was a good runner and an excellent baseball and soccer player.
The person who was deeply wrong, the person who instigated some of the evil, who diabolically catalyzed it in many ways, was Dick, who had set out to poison my friendships with Michael Raith and Johnny and other friends of mine when I was very, very young, beginning in 1971 when I had my 6th birthday party.
At a time when our country is run by a wannabe dictator, who tries to divide and conquer, who seeks to destroy and defame anyone who is different, we should all realize the corrosive effects of bullying, and we should do everything to stop it.
I want to emphasize that the bullying and anti-Semitism of Mrs. Crawley, Dick and others did not ruin my life.
To the contrary, I have a good life, and I am grateful to be alive, to be with Carol, my loving bride, to be a writer, as I have been for years, and to be a member of a great family with parents, who have nurtured and raised me so well.
I do not spend my time worrying about Mrs. Crawley, Dick or other evil people, who committed character assassination against me.
They have to answer to God.
As do Trump and his sycophants.
While I do not dwell on these evildoers, we do need to illuminate the truth and expose bullies for their evil, so that we can change policies and do our best to prevent bullies, including in the political class, from hurting others now and in the future.
On a separate note, many years after elementary school, when I was a young man of 24, I had a best friend in my Hebrew immersion or ulpan program at Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek in Israel, whose name was Iorg Rottermund. Iorg was from Germany, and he was not Jewish.
A brilliant student and dedicated socialist, who had worked on a communal farm in his native Germany and had a Masters in Social Work, Iorg wanted to stay on the kibbutz following the completion of our ulpan in May 1990.
He told me that the leaders of the kibbutz said that he could stay but only if he converted to Judaism.
Though Mishmar Haemek, which is located in the Jezreel Valley, not far from Nazareth, practiced essentially no religion on the kibbutz, there were Holocaust survivors living there.
Out of sensitivity to survivors of the concentration camps, the kibbutz elders made this request of Iorg to convert.
Iorg, who did great work as a mechanic in the musak, the kibbutz garage, was not willing to convert, and as a result he was told that he would not be able to stay on the kibbutz.
“What do you think of that?” said Iorg, a dashing fellow, who had a dark, blond mustache, as we sat on the porch of the second floor of the building, where we lived at Mishmar Haemek.
“I think they’re making a mistake,” I said, and I told him that I was sorry.
Iorg, whose family saved Jews during the Holocaust, was one of the best human beings I have met.
While I understood the delicate nature of the issue, concerning victims of the Shoah, Iorg was and always had been a mensch, an angel, and he should not have been faulted for anything, let alone the fact that he was born in Germany.
Clearly, we are all individuals; and no group of people, not Jews, not Germans, not the Irish, not any ethnicity, race or religion, has a monopoly on morality, intelligence or anything else.
As for Dick, who happened to be from a white, Catholic family, he and other kids from our hometown taunted and mocked Bernie, a friend of mine, who, as I mentioned earlier, was of Puerto Rican descent. They ridiculed him so badly that Bernie, who had stood up for me, later changed his last name from a Latino one to an Irish one.
I have reported before that Dick once sadistically asked me why I had not changed my last name after the evil he had done in damaging my reputation in Hamden, where he bore false witness against me and poisoned my friendships with so many people, including Brian, Bob, Bernie, Michael Raith and Johnny.
Like the child, who lies in the 2007 movie Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, Dick did a terrible thing at a young age, a terrible sin that has had repercussions that could last for a lifetime.
But the movie does not present a perfect analogy.
In Atonement, the child, Briony, played by Saoirse Ronan, does try to atone for misinterpreting an incident between her older sister, Cecilia, and Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, a misinterpretation that leads to tragic consequences for many characters, including a false charge of rape against Robbie and his arrest, as well as other events that ruin their lives.
By contrast, Dick, whose evil has led to a great deal of pain for many people, has never atoned.
Nor did Dick misinterpret anything.
Dick intentionally harmed me, just as he intentionally harmed others who got in the way.
In his own way, Dick secretly admired me, just as Saoirse Ronan’s Briony secretly admires and yearns for Robbie, her older sister’s lover.
As it turns out, when she is an adult, Briony becomes a novelist, and, as mentioned earlier, she tries to rectify or atone for the horrible tragedies that have occurred.
She can only atone through her fiction, and that may not be good enough.
The story is quite complicated in Atonement, as it is in my life, with some observers, who knew about the cruelty and the lies but did nothing to stop this evil and in fact enabled or even participated in the evil and its cover-up.
And there is more than a little irony involved, not least because I am a writer, a novelist and a journalist, but I am not the one who set out to destroy another person’s life.
Dick, who is not a writer, sinned horribly, one of the worst sins, according to the Book of Revelation, in lying about and committing character assassination against me, an act of hatred that has followed him more than it has followed me over the decades.
He harmed, as I say, many people along the way.
Like all of us, Dick is capable of redemption.
He is capable of atonement.
Of course, it takes years to atone, to redeem yourself.
You have to ask God for forgiveness, and you have to reconfigure your life.
I certainly cannot judge anyone.
But I can assess those who have harmed me, such as the people who never invited my family to join High Lane Club, or the woman who would not let me go to nursery school at the neighborhood church, or Mrs. Crawley, who tried to commit “soul murder” against me, or Dick, who learned the wrong lessons at a young age and has never repented.
I forgive all of these people, but I will stay away from them until they apologize and truly reconfigure their lives.
While I don’t know how Robert Reich feels about the bullies who harmed him years ago, I suspect that he is focused more on the bully who is harming all of us now.
Reich is a national treasure, and I look forward to reading his new book, Coming up Short, which, like all of his posts, is eloquent and fierce, as I could tell from hearing him read his introduction and the first chapter in an online video.
He is a role model for so many of us for so many reasons, including the fact that he has refused to let bullies ruin his life, and he has persevered with love, which is the most powerful force of all.
Yes, love is the single biggest factor in my life. It is why I have persisted, why I have never given up and why I am so grateful to God for sending me angels, like Carol, my beautiful wife.
Bullying should always be condemned. As should racism, anti-Semitism and any other form of bigotry.
School principals and teachers as well as adults in neighborhoods need to do their best to stop these acts of hatred, which can contribute to increased rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, psychosis and suicidal ideation for the victims.
Not one of us is perfect, but we all should strive to improve as human beings and to ask for forgiveness when we have hurt people, even when the sins took place when we were young.
Sometimes, those sins are the most egregious, as Dick well knows.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.