No Thanks, So-Called "50th" Class Reunion

This isn't going to be a very upbeat article, so you're welcome to pass on it if you would prefer. During the past few years, from time to time I wondered whether I would attend my high school's "Class of 1974" fifty-year reunion, should they decide to hold one.  I had avoided the previous reunions, thinking that maybe it would be better to let maybe just a little more time to separate me from those largely nightmare years of being "institutionalized" in a large public school ruled by bullies, snobs, and mostly indifferent teachers.  It was supposed to be the premier high school in my county with a higher number of wealthy families sending their kids there, so I'm assuming that the other places were probably higher in their percentage of bullies and lower with the snobs.  Don't get me wrong, I believe in forgiving although not necessarily forgetting the treatment I got back then as a kid just trying to get through each day.  I even picked up a few Facebook friends from there, although the only ones who ever responded to my posts on it were hard-right Trump kooks, full of venom whenever I wrote something they opposed...especially when I wrote some pieces urging gun regulation following mass shootings.  Finally, one of them put out a racist posting and I unfriended him...one night a few months ago I finally saw the writing on the wall and unfriended the entire lot of fellow alumni and haven't regretted it one bit.  So back to that upcoming reunion in 1974...I just got an email asking me for an RSVP on it...which was to start yesterday!  Uh, it's 2023 and unless my arithmetical skills are failing me, that's 49, not 50 years.  But wait, reading on I discovered that they decided to combine the classes of '73 and '74...guess they won't be holding one for my group next year after all.  In the email were listed those who had replied that they would be attending...one of them was the biggest, meanest bully of that class above me, a trained boxer no less, who I was stuck with for years at my own bus stop and who actually resembled the Scut Farkus bully character in the movie A Christmas Story: yeah, like I want to party with that dude!  They say the years can effect great changes on people...I know that's true in my own case, hopefully for the better.  But unless I see my old "buddies" from school show some of that change within themselves, I think I'd instead just rather keep my distance from them: better to just pick 100 strangers at random and have a wingding with them. Sadly, I feel that even holding a 6oth reunion wouldn't change anything...