When I was seven years old, my parents (both secularists) took me from Israel, my birthplace and home, and brought me to Montreal. It took some getting used to. One thing that I have never gotten used to is the detached, ambivalent, cynical, and often downright cruelty of Canadian society. What is more, I began to experience for the first time, hatred from those other children, whose parents had taught them to hate the Jews. I am sure that all of these things exist in Israel, but I had never experienced them there.
One aspect of my new life in Canada, which caused a great deal of anxiety for me, was bullying. Again, I'm sure that too exists in Israel, though I had never experienced it there. There was one particular individual, who was about seven years older than me, named Jimmy. Jimmy was an equal opportunity bully; all of the children in my neighborhood despised him and feared him.
Some of my experiences with Jimmy are too painful for me to relate here, but one incident seems particularly important, because its themes may resonate with some of you. Indeed this particular incident is symbolic of so much of how the world works today.
I was getting used to my first Canadian winter. It took a great deal of effort to learn to appreciate freezing temperatures, piles of snow, frostbite, and numbness. By March, when the children had a week off from school, Montreal had been covered by several feet of snow. I was outside, trying to maneuver in several layers of snow clothes. The snow was the right consistency to build snowmen, and I would attempt to build my first, just outside my apartment building.
So I laboured over my creation for more than an hour, ignoring the fact that my toes were stinging from mild frostbite. And then came Jimmy. He said nothing as he walked up to me. He looked at my beautiful creation and sneered, his piggish eyes like two craters on his pimpled face. And then he kicked my snowman down. He did not wait for the reaction of some of the people in my building, who no doubt were looking on (because they always looked on). Jimmy ran off.
I didn't cry, but I was crushed. I had spent an hour perfecting this snowman and in a matter of seconds it was demolished. Though I was young, I remember reflecting upon the event with remarkable wisdom. I thought there are those who create and those who destroy. Some devote their lives to creating works of great beauty and magnificence, and some seek only to reduce everything to rubble.
There are some who would suggest that Jimmy was misunderstood, that he was the victim of bullying himself, that he was frustrated. But I know what Jimmy was--pure evil. I understand that Jimmy and those like him absolutely hate achievement and beauty and success. They seek nothing good to enrich their lives. They are only ever content to destroy.
On September 11, 2001, I saw a nation of Jimmys strike at tremendous achievements. They attaced all that was beautiful, all that was successful. They did it because they only desire to destroy, so that everyone should live in the type of squalor that they live in. They would reduce our achievements to dust as soon as they could, whenever they could.
There is no sense in bargaining the Jimmys out there. There is no sense in building dialogues with them or trying to be understanding to what they could have gone through that made them this way. The only thing to do with evil is to make them incapable of reducing your achievements to rubble. All too often I hear well-meaning people say that the bullys are also the victims, but I think that this is nonsense.
Today, Jimmy is in jail, though I don't know what for, but I am sure that he belongs there. What will we do to make sure that all the people like him end up where he is?
Topic: Understanding Jimmy (Read 448 times)