That was my experience in school. I frequently got worse punishment than my bullies. Then the one day I actually fought back I got worse punishment again. But the next day I was ignored by the bullies.
I can just hear someone out there saying that’s what the school wanted to teach me but dude, it was not some reasoned, cool headed, defense of myself. It was a dirty emotional scrap where I used anything I had to hand. If I had possessed a weapon it would have been used. That’s not resilience training, that’s trauma and teaching kids they cannot trust authority. Because if you think the lesson was lost on anyone around me then you are a fool.
No, this isn’t, “don’t talk to the police”. This is, “don’t pay taxes, don’t vote, fight the police, fuck everything, the system is rigged and all government employees are complicit in a system of cruelty.”
One of those is a valuable lesson and the other is going to give us the next Unabomber.
We should have trust in the system. The system is supposed to be representational of the people that fund it through their taxes and elections for people like school boards, town councils, and DAs.
If the system is fucked, it’s our fault…not the systems.
The root of the problem is that nobody wants systemic fixes. Everyone elected either wants to fix their own little corner independently or just ignore it and starve the beast. Neither work. Systemic problems need to be addressed systematically.
Let’s look at bullying and the causes of it…usually the bullies are abused or neglected, and usually abuse and neglect comes from generational poverty. So you gotta fix that. But nobody wants to.
I’ve actually had a couple of my bullies reach out to me recently, now nearly 30 years later and they are parents themselves, apologizing for the shit they put me through because their home life was shit. Their words, not mine.
That was my experience in school. I frequently got worse punishment than my bullies. Then the one day I actually fought back I got worse punishment again. But the next day I was ignored by the bullies.
I can just hear someone out there saying that’s what the school wanted to teach me but dude, it was not some reasoned, cool headed, defense of myself. It was a dirty emotional scrap where I used anything I had to hand. If I had possessed a weapon it would have been used. That’s not resilience training, that’s trauma and teaching kids they cannot trust authority. Because if you think the lesson was lost on anyone around me then you are a fool.
Which is still a valuable lesson
No, this isn’t, “don’t talk to the police”. This is, “don’t pay taxes, don’t vote, fight the police, fuck everything, the system is rigged and all government employees are complicit in a system of cruelty.”
One of those is a valuable lesson and the other is going to give us the next Unabomber.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
We should have trust in the system. The system is supposed to be representational of the people that fund it through their taxes and elections for people like school boards, town councils, and DAs.
If the system is fucked, it’s our fault…not the systems.
The root of the problem is that nobody wants systemic fixes. Everyone elected either wants to fix their own little corner independently or just ignore it and starve the beast. Neither work. Systemic problems need to be addressed systematically.
Let’s look at bullying and the causes of it…usually the bullies are abused or neglected, and usually abuse and neglect comes from generational poverty. So you gotta fix that. But nobody wants to.
I’ve actually had a couple of my bullies reach out to me recently, now nearly 30 years later and they are parents themselves, apologizing for the shit they put me through because their home life was shit. Their words, not mine.
Yeah, it is generally considered to be a bad thing.