WhatsApp and high school, thirty some years later

26 October

It would surprise nobody that the vagaries of language are eternally interesting for me. Even less surprising would be the amount of times that I have found myself arguing with a male friend -always a male friend- about that golden age, that happy, free and long gone time in which we males together could make all the jokes that we wanted to make, without having to have to pay attention to all those recent restrictions in language. My grandma, who used to call them good manners, would laugh herself out. All the same and in despite of my grandma, twenty years ago people used to call them political correctness, and nowadays everybody seems to hate woke language, that new sticker for the same old wine. In one way or another, there is always that nostalgia for a time before, a time in which those spoilsports, those nannies (or language-nazis or femi-nazis depending who is doing the complaining) did not exist, and our life was simpler, and funnier.

The debate has been so frequent, that actually I begun to doubt about myself few years back. Perhaps my friends are right and I am the overtly careful, extremely considering, too diplomatic one? Perhaps, if we all are strong, we all can take whatever derisive joke is thrown at us, and thrown some back too. That would not be that bad, at least as a goal, no? Everybody strong and everybody making fun of everybody, he?

Well, a couple of years I was invited to a yet another Venezuelan whatsapp group, the group of my high school cohort. Perhaps it is like that in some other migrants and expats groups, but I am not aware, and actually, I don’t think so. Venezuelans have embraced whatsapp as enthusiastically as we embraced telenovelas. It does go without saying that a Venezuelan user of whatsapp will have the family group, the group of the family without the parents, the group of the cousins and perhaps the group with the uncles and aunts. Then the people that once went together to a memorable Morrocoy weekend (about twenty years ago), and certainly the ones that started University together.  Without mentioning the groups of the friends, the good friends and the acquaintances. And then there are also those three or four groups that we don’t know what they are for or when did we get into them, but where we still recognise one or two names, so we are not that willing to step out. God forbids, we might miss some piece of news or something. And so I found myself in the group of (most of) the people that ended high school with.

I did attend a catholic high school, and we were the last only-males cohort. So I didn’t only expect to reconnect with long forgotten friends, but also I strengthen myself against an incoming inflow of prayers and photos of diverse catholic saints. Which came, even if not in the volume that I expected. What did came that I didn’t expect, surely not in 2022, was an ongoing flow of light porn. I thought that those of us that would have appreciated it would by now know how to type pornhub in the browser. But then again, the comments on the photos did shed some light to my memory, on that belle époque in which we were all teenagers unencumbered by any sense of political correctness, or wokedness or whatever it is going to be called in the foreseeable future.

For a while it did look like the porn, besides illustrating the not-so diverse and not-so surprising taste of my fellows (blonde, big breasted and thin waisted) was tolerable. I did start wondering if the comments were needed (“imagine what would I do with those titties” kind of thing), but those texts were also easy to overlook. What finally got me what the reawakening of old hurts.

As it happened, for a couple of years I was heavily bullied at school, strong enough so that teachers ask the school board to place me in another class. Now and then I wondered if the bullies were among the ones I was now chatting with, but actually my memory for names is poor, so I didn’t really figure it out. Not everybody forgot, though.

One of those days, possibly a friday, somebody named Chen showed up. Right after he was greeted by everybody, one or two used that old nickname that we all used then, loosely translated as “chink”. A terse text came back saying that today he preferred to be called by his full name. And of course, somebody else did ask “but you are not offended, are you? it was so long ago… and we didn’t meant it badly, ok?”. And then a string of variations on that theme.

The ensuing exchange wasn’t pretty. Nobody shouted to anybody, and nobody was too offended either. After a while, Chen simply left the group. All in all it looked that nobody had realised that the use of a racial slur to name a person was hurtful. Not then, and neither today. Just as nobody considered that a women, even if only a sexual partner, might be more than a couple of big breasts to play with. Somehow, everybody shielded himself by repeating that our intentions were friendly, that everybody did it, that it was ok.

The weird thing is that pretty much every one of the persons that I keep contact with from that time were bullied in one way or another. We all have talked about it, and we are all relieved that it’s not likely to happen to our kids nowadays. We all seemed to be repulsed by that bullying  from then.

On one and one conversations, that is.

It was enough to put us all together again for all of us to fall again and again into our older selfs, in our self-justifying bullshit, in our belief that if we didn’t admit to be hurt, then nobody would, and then everybody would be ok. It did not matter that we actually knew better. It did not matter that we all knew that we were, and are, still hurting.

We still liked to believe in that good old time.