The Coldest Blooded Killer Of All

Have you ever been a bully? Think honeslty about this, because the truth in this matter can be very enlightening.

When I was a kid, more often than not I was the victim of bullying, in school, in my neighbourhood and even in my own family. But on one or two occasions I clearly remember becoming the bully. And I remember the reason I did so in every case: peer preasure.

I once turned on my own best friend, simply because for a rare moment I felt accepted by a group of other boys for doing so. I actually tried to apologize to him later, but he just shrugged it off and said it was okay, he "understood", which made me feel even worse.

But I didn't understand. It was the first time I ever really sucumbed to peer preasure. As a younger child, for some reason, peer preasure did not seem to be a part of my world.

Once, around age six, I was playing with a group of other boys around my age in a playground sandbox. Suddenly several of the other kids started yelling, “Oh no! Here comes that stupid German kid!” (we lived on an Army base in Germany, and sometimes German families would come visit the American families on base). All the other kids scattered; except me. I just continued playing with my toy jeep in the sandbox as I watched the unfamiliar boy approach. He came straight up to me since I was the only child who didn't run away from him and began a jovial though mostly one-sided conversation with me in German.

So what happened between the age of six and fifteen, when with a group of other boyscouts on a camping trip I started calling my best friend names along with the other scouts because he was the only kid who couldn't run fast enough to jump up onto the the supply truck for a free ride back to the campsite? Mob mentality; a.k.a. peer preasure, that's what happened. It is the coldest blooded killer of all.