Go into any chicken coop and feed the chickens. You will immediately learn that the biggest and strongest birds will get the first shot at the food. The weaker birds will have to wait for what’s left. And if they try to get some before the social order permits them, they will be pecked without mercy, often by many other chickens. The rooster is not involved in this very often, but when they are, the result is often death to another rooster.
My recent high school reunion reminded me a great deal about the pecking order and how traumatic and cruel people can be to the lower part of the order. I wasn’t very popular and was the butt of cruel jokes sometimes, but I was nowhere near the bottom of the order.
I happened to encounter, via Facebook, a relative of the person who was probably at the bottom of our school pecking order. I am advised that the person I am referring to has needed help to live for some time now.
I hardly knew this person at all. Yet when I transferred into my high school in the middle of my freshman year almost the first thing I learned was this person at the bottom of the order was, depending on the person telling me, weird, insane, a misfit, and more. Yet in more than three years of sharing a homeroom I never observed any of the wild behavior she was alleged to have.
This person, no doubt, had unspeakable cruelties aimed at her. She didn’t dare enter any of the activities after school. She was physically somewhat different and often ran away from the building after school was over. She was laughed at because of her funny running style. There wasn’t much she could do right in the pecking order but scramble around trying to get meager leftovers. The yearbook says she was in a club, but wasn't in the club picture. The most she ever got was pity or people ignoring her. I won’t go into the worst she got. . . except to say that every day produced some sort of sorrow. In the 3 plus years I observed her in my homeroom, she smiled exactly once when our homeroom teacher said something nice to her.
Today, there is a growing effort to stop bullying in the schools. It sometimes meets with success, but more often than not, it is ignored until it explodes into violence such as the many incidents of school shootings we have seen in the past decade. Or, more often, it results in the personal collapse of the victim.
The pecking order is based on status within the group. And sometimes our chicken-people are cruel to others simply to maintain their ranking. They look at the bottom of the order and do cruel things to avoid going there themselves.
This is abuse – child abuse given by other children. As a teacher, I continued to see it for many years. And I reacted with concern but not knowing what to do. I would refer it to principals and guidance counselors. Yet as I look back on my “busy, carefree high school days,” I now know that a few simple acts of kindness would have gone a long way. And I feel some guilt for not doing something as simple as that.
And as I wonder where our ability to treat people with such cruelty comes from, I think about the fundamentalist church. There is a “holy war” against, among other people, the divorced, the poor, those who have had an abortion, other religious beliefs, science, liberal politics, and so much more. And yet they believe that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. What an example of the benefits of salvation! They have placed themselves at the top of the pecking order. And they have produced a culture of hate as great as any jihad of Islam’s extremists.
As Jesus said: "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." (Matthew 7:1-5 RSV)
