Bullying

Jennifer Hancock, a practicing humanist, has posted some interesting videos on Youtube about childhood bullying. As I listen to her ideas, I become more and more conscious of the bullying process in current daily life.

 

My street has been under construction for weeks. The local water-sewer system is being revamped to diminish waste spillage into Massachusetts Bay. This is a good thing.

 

Unfortunately, on the ground, the construction company which holds the contracts is badly supervised and given free rein by municipal permit-granters to use my street as their own. Parking along most of the street has been banned all day from Monday through Friday. This is absolutely unnecessary when the actual work is limited to a small area of the street on some days.

 

Last week I filed a complaint against a police officer who was in the employ of the construction company. She had unnecessarily, and probably illegally, banned me from entrance to the street to access my own driveway. I received the standard response from the representatives of the project, middlemen who are hired to deal with supervising the project for the water-sewer authority. A verbal apology was made during a phone call, but was modified with excuses for the police officer's behavior and an assertion that the contractor makes every effort to accommodate people who live near the work. This assertions I totally unsubstantiated by the workers' behaviors.

 

Yesterday was payback by the bullies. An empty, unused dump truck was parked with idling engine in front of my driveway, where my car was parked. There was no driver in the truck as it idled nearly all day. When I needed to leave my driveway around 1 PM, the driver appeared and sat in the truck without any indication he would move. Then a huge bulldozer entered the act. Truck and bulldozer did a ballet in front of my driveway for several minutes as I sat waiting to exit. The bulldozer came close to grazing the back of my Toyota Echo at one point.

 

When I returned from my shopping 90 minutes later, the truck was parked and idling without a driver in front of my driveway. The policeman at the entrance to the street had been quite congenial when he waved me up the one-way. I had hoped to just scoot into my driveway. When I saw the unoccupied truck, I knew this was no happenstance. There were hundreds of feet of empty curb away from driveways where the truck could have been left.

 

I parked my car at the curb. I got my groceries and other items into the house in three trips up and down my driveway, as a few construction workers watched from 50 yards up the street, where the actual work was being done. No truck driver appeared from among the gang. No effort was made to accommodate. I then had to move my car off the street by driving back down it and around the block to a parking space at the curb.

 

As I walked toward the construction site on my way back to my house, a construction worker pointed at me and gestured toward my house. He was laughing as he apparently explained their prank to a man in business clothes. The construction worker avoided my glance as I passed. The man in the business clothes gave me an embarrassed and insincere "Hello" which I ignored. The truck had been removed from in front of my driveway as I had been driving around the block.

 

I have radar for bullying. I grew up gay in America in the 1950s and 1960s. The construction workers of today were the my teachers and my fellow students of yesterday. I also know how to deal with it in my own practiced way. Today I will be filing formal complaints with various state and municipal authorities. The idling truck was not only a violation of transportation laws and vehicle registration laws but also a violation of city, state and federal environmental-protection laws. The word can indeed be mightier than the sword, or the backward aggression of adult men who have never grown up.