“Hey You, Retard”

[June 8, 2025]  Attending the ninth grade, at a Little Rock junior high school, a teacher called over to me, yelling “Hey you, retard.”  I was setting up starting blocks for an upcoming 50-yard dash event at the outdoor track. “Yeah you, retard.”  He was going to chew me out for setting the blocks incorrectly.

Kids will use the word “retard” as a slur, an insult to provoke a fight, or as a way of showing others that you’re a tough kid.  Name-calling among kids (in your peer group) is also a way to test other kids to see if they’re worthy enough to be in your friend group. My friends and I were used to being called names, even if we didn’t like it. My Mom would say, “sticks and stones will break my bones, but …” We all knew this, yet emotionally it was hard to let name-calling roll off our backs.

This teacher, a real ass and not liked by any of us kids, was used to getting away with calling kids names. Teacher-to-student name calling has a different purpose than student-to-student. I’d not yet learned not to chase after the person who was dangling my emotions on a string. To not react is to not play their game, to remain stoic, to show that I’m resilient, could be the greatest repudiation of all.  I’d not yet reached this level of maturity.

What was I to do?  I was a skinny kid, maybe 13 years old and weighing in at a measly 95 pounds.  I could not fight the teacher; I’d be blamed and expelled. This school had a reputation for expelling students for misconduct. And any disagreement between a student and a teacher would inevitably be labeled as student misconduct. After asking around who this teacher was, I discovered he was the social science teacher and tennis coach. I also found out that he maliciously called kids “retards” as a way of “putting us in our place.”

A head-on retaliatory act was a nonstarter. This meant being sneaky, underhanded, stealthy, to extract payback. I would take, what WW2 strategist B.H. Liddell Hart called, the “indirect approach” to warfare. Of course, I had no clue at all that Hart’s idea existed and had been put to good use, especially in land warfare in the Pacific against the Imperial Japanese army.

The idea was to avoid going to this teacher and either confronting him directly, and surely losing the battle, or getting some small victory without getting caught.  Looking back, it might have simply been a better solution to drop the idea of hitting back altogether.

My first thought was to use a fart Whoopee Cushion on his classroom desk chair. These can still be bought for about $10 in most discount stores.  Now I found this idea the funniest but I would be out one costly fart Whoopee. I even thought of writing ”You Retard” on the Whoopee and laughed at the idea. This was a non starter idea.

This scares me a little because I saw an evil streak in me that I was not yet under my control.  Instead, I brought my dad’s screwdriver to class, and while everyone was at recess, I loosened all the screws holding his seat onto the metal legs of his chair. The outcome was preordained at that point. All I needed were witnesses, and there would be plenty of them.

Shortly after the “big fall” teacher incident, there was an investigation by the school, and nothing was found nefarious (ha ha, I’d gotten away with it). Later, I was transferred into Social Science class and guess who was my new teacher?  “Hey you, retard.”  Psychologists have labeled my behavior as “retaliatory aggression,” and it is one of the most common, well-recognized, and well-studied behavioral responses for dealing with threats and challenges.  Who knew?

There’s a lesson here, and I clearly didn’t catch it at the time. Humans have a thirst for retaliatory behavior in the face of a threat or loss.  Having the capabilities and skills to respond but to keep that proclivity under control is the hallmark of a strong and moral person. I would not learn this from the “big fall” incident, but later, as I studied military history in college, I discovered a new way of properly handling myself.

I still have a strong desire to retaliate against those who threaten me or my family and friends, but I’ve learned that striking back often carries far greater risks to me professionally and personally than I would want to pay. In his play King Henry IV, Shakespeare wrote: “the better part of valor is discretion, in which the better part I have saved my life.”  Good advice for those who would allow their emotions to rule their lives.

“Hey you, retard” still rings in my mind. Now I can only smile.

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Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).