Purple Hazing

My son came home on Friday with a story that struck me square in my parenting solar plexus. He told us that it was "Freshman Friday." What, his parents asked quizzically, was "Freshman Friday?"
"It's the day that all the seventh and eighth graders beat up the sixth graders."
All of them?
"Not all of them. Mostly just the boys. Before P.E."
And now my heart sank. All of the joy that my son had been taking in his progress and participation in middle school physical education was suddenly at risk of evaporating into the ether. Didn't the coach do anything to stop it?
"We had a sub today, and it all happened before they came out."
Thus began a days-long project of getting to the bottom of this "tradition." We discovered that it was a hand-me-down from high school, and it had occurred to the seventh and eighth graders that since they were destined to be embarrassed and pummelled when they became ninth graders, it was only fair that they pass along their potential torment ahead of the actual grief to kids who had no reckoning of such torture. There are, after all, no freshman in middle school.
We talked to the principal and his P.E. teacher. We told him how it was really a backhanded (unfortunate choice of words) compliment. The boys who shoved him around were welcoming him in a way that made little or no sense to him or his parents.
But it reminded me of the fear I felt from the first day of spring when I was in sixth grade. The kid down the street had told me that I should look forward to "initiation" into junior high. I walked quickly past his house, or avoided it by walking the long way around the block. A few friends suggested that I could just surrender to the inevitable and get it over with, but I had heard stories from other friends who got "smeared." I had no interest or inclination to have shaving cream in my hair or lipstick on my face, arms, neck, back, and so on. It would also, almost certainly, involve a degree of pain with which I was uncomfortable.
That's when I came back to the present. I realized that there were no reassuring words I could offer my son. We can walk him to and from school, and he can eat his lunch in the science room, but there is always some nimrod out there ready to share his fractured vision of acceptance when you least expect it. And for the record, the kid down the street never did follow through on his threats. I just spent the summer in hiding. This is how we learn.