The victim of Romney's alleged haircut attack died in 2004, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story. But in the mid 1990s, 20 years after the fact, he reportedly told one of the witnesses, “It was horrible. It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

I dread the prospect of encountering these people again because I fear confirmation that what seemed to me at the time to be just youthful give and take caused, as I came later to suspect, significant pain and left lingering emotional scars.

Though I never participated in, much less led, such an extreme violation, I often ran with the alpha kids. At best, we lacked empathy and failed to extend kindnesses to peers we perceived as “different.” At worst we pointedly marginalized and teased them.

The most vivid of these allegations is that Romney led a group attack in which he forcibly cut the hair of a boy whose long blond locks offended his sense of propriety and conformity.

The name of the moment alludes to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, of course, and refers to revelations from Romney’s former high school classmates published last week that he bullied and harassed other students, particularly effeminate males, in the mid 1960s.

I both dread and welcome my “Mitt Moment,” by which I mean my confrontation with the cruelties I inflicted on others during adolescence.

Yes, I was immature – most of my offenses were in junior high, not high school – and self-absorbedly just trying to find and secure my own place in a fraught social milieu. Differences confused and sometimes threatened me, though I never would have been able to articulate it at the time, and the safest way for me not to become an outcast was to join with those doing the casting out.

Simple, nasty teen social dynamics, in other words.

“Dumb things,” was Romney’s admission when he faced his Mitt Moment.

Yes. Unreflective. Shallow. Regrettable.

Even those of us who never used violence or threats of violence to elevate our status inflicted a lot more hurt than we knew.

I’ve forgiven myself for these transgressions. I outgrew the mindset and the insecurity that prompted it. Experience taught me to embrace rather than revile differences. I learned from but left behind the callow teen who’d been gratuitously hard on the unpopular kids.

“There is no question I became a very different person since then,” as Romney put it.

But forgiving myself is easy. Earning forgiveness from those I wronged will be harder and will likely require words more heartfelt and searching than, “I was just a confused kid, too” and similar psychobabble. It may not be successful.

Why, then, do I welcome my Mitt Moment? Because I’d like the chance to try to reconcile. Because I see in my past some debts to be repaid in books that are still open.

I know I’ll have to find words a little less glib than Romney’s: “As to pranks that were played back then, I don't remember them all but again, high school days -- if I did stupid things I'm afraid I gotta say sorry for it,” he said in one interview last week. In another, “If anybody was hurt by that or offended by that, I apologize.”

If?

No.

An apology may not contain the word “if,” particularly in a case where the word implies that the victim was overreacting to ordinary hijinks and the pain was due to a misunderstanding.

And it probably should contain a larger message, particularly when you’re a prominent person with the opportunity to reach a larger audience.

I’ve yet to have a Mitt Moment. Perhaps because those I teased have more pressing concerns and bigger demons than 40-year-old slights. Perhaps because they’ve blocked out the memory of those years. Perhaps because they’re going alphabetically through their tormenters and haven’t gotten to me yet.

But I’ve tried to make amends by, from time to time, using this modest platform to spread the word about bullying in hopes of somehow reaching children who are now where I was and convincing them that cruelty never lifts a person up.

Romney has a far larger platform to help deliver the same message.

UPDATE: Nancy Nall has written a weasel-free speech for Romney:

I’ve recently been reminded that I was a bully in high school, and picked on one boy in particular. (The story mentions another boy, and a teacher as well, but let’s not be petty.) I wonder how many of us would like to live with the consequences of our high-school behavior for the rest of our lives. While the incident isn’t indelibly imprinted in my memory, others remember a consistent picture of events, and I will take their word I did what they say I did. I’ll only add that 50 years covers a lot of time not just in my life, but in that of the country. I’m sure gay students at Cranbrook today have it a lot easier, and for that I’m grateful. I’m certainly sorry I was part of the problem then. I’d like to be part of the solution now.