Letter to the Unknown Mobber

Once again you’ve played your sickening game. You’ve driven another one into the blackest pit of despair. Some random victim; maybe someone who’s not the teachers’ pet, someone who’s a bit introverted, someone who differs from mainstream? A young someone, a someone who is close to me, was picked and made your target. Endless months, maybe years of being bullied, of silent suffering under the unseeing eyes of school mates and teachers. Right to the brink of suicide, of deliverance by self-annihilation.

There’s a youth shattered, a family suffering and struggling to open up a path into a better future.

And there’s you. The bully and your henchmen.

You act the part of the regular guys, the cool ones, the nice ones, the strong ones, the normal ones. But you and I know: you’re not. You’re not cool nor even normal. You and I know that you are grinning cowards, sadistic perverts, psychotic freaks. You and I know that you are the classroom equivalents of those who denounced others as witches four hundred years ago, of those who humiliated and later helped annihilate their Jewish neighbours in the Third Reich, of those who torture and kill for the »Islamic State«, of those who made themselves the willing tools of Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Pinochet and their ilk. That’s what you are. And you know it.

But your neat facade is still intact.

Sure, there’s all that talk now, about fairness, about mindfulness, sensitivity, ethics, wokeness. – You hear it. I hear it. Your victim hears it. Every day. Plenty of it. But you keep your smile, for you know that it’s just words and words and words and that you need not fear them but can even use them to improve your camouflage. Thus you join the choir and sing those words too, because you have realised that it’s all about appearances and that being the regular, nice guy lets you get away with anything. And so – while you help adorn the school building with bright rainbow flags – you look around with a smile and single out your next victim from among the crowd.

That’s just how it works, right? You are safe. You go unpunished. You’ll always get away. — But then, that’s what every criminal believes …

Für meine deutschsprachigen Leser gibt es diesen Brief auch auf Deutsch (PDF, 57 kB).