Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul S
During almost all of this period, my son was being victimized through most of his school years. If it wasn't verbal abuse, it was, for example, tossing his new gym sneakers into a toilet bowl full of feces. These were not rare occurrences - it was incessant. AND, these sort of things carried over to social media.
|
It was cleaner when we were kids, w/o cyberbullying and w/o the overprotective overreactions. I feel sorry for the kids today who are bullied; they get lots of well-meaning clucking from the powers that be but they aren't given the leeway to learn to take care of their own situations. I was bullied terribly in Jr. High and the school did nothing, as was the norm, except make me sit down with the worst of the abusers and share my feelings. Which made things so much worse since teenage boys don't really have feelings except angry, hungry and horny. My father lost all patience with the p***y wimps at the school. He told me I had to handle my own troubles and took me to a karate studio. He and the instructor told me to lay low for a while, learn to fight, and then beat the hell out of the first bully who tried me. I applied myself fanatically to the training and the next kid at school who started to get physically abusive with me never knew what hit him. Knocked his ass down and nearly out in the school yard. The bullying stopped dead in its tracks. I then went after another of the bullies from my old school who showed up at a party; when he started up I publicly forced him to choose to leave the party rather than fight me. Again, no repercussions from adults in either situation: we handled our own s**t. Today, I would get suspended for defending myself, which is a shame. IMO that is why some kids just snap when they are bullied and go to extremes like armed mayhem or suicide; they must feel like they have no other means of taking control over their lives, and that must be so enraging. I mean, to tell an abused kid (and bullying is abuse, no doubts there) that if he defends himself against an abuser he will be dealt with as a co-equal offender, that would have made things so much harder for me. I still would have hit that kid, but I'd have paid a price for it that would have been entirely unfair; I had a future that would have been damaged by a suspension but that dimwit is probably offering to put cheese on the burger for the next customer. Don't need college for that...