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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.
teaching kids they cannot trust authority
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.
Not saying your experience was a good thing by any stretch, but I do think especially in the U.S, we all run into that point at one time or another, when it really hits you that the "authorities" don't really have much stake in your well-being, and so usually disregard it.
A lot of times this will be in school, yeah, with nonsense "zero tolerance policies."
Other times it's the "You can trust me and tell me anything" HR department that fires you for "performance reasons" conveniently after being a harassment victim.
Eventually something goes the wrong way and you realize "Help ain't coming." And it sucks.
Ourselves and each other are who we've really got in the end. Look out for each other. <3
Yeah, one time is a lesson. I'm more talking about the kids that are bullied for years, ostracized, and yes punished for the pleasure of being beat and humiliated multiple times a day. It happens in every school unless action is taken to stop it. Those kids? Those are the ones being radicalized.
Oh yeah, absolutely agreed.
Schools will care so much about their reputations, deny responsibility, and then it's all "thoughts and prayers, who could imagine such a thing" when their gamble busts.
I bet they secretly love the "gun debate" because they can just back out Homer Simpson style while everyone fights and argues about dangerous objects, meanwhile they'll continue to cultivate an environment where they can ignore the kids who are learning to hate the world and everyone in it with such intensity they'll feel like doing something terrible about it.
Adequate motivation will always find the means, and they keep creating an environment that fosters that motivation.
If we take this thinking to its ridiculous extreme: Admins likely wouldn't care if they had an entire school of bullied, depressed, violently rageful potential killers in every class, provided they were able to remove all of these students' hands and the funding kept flowing.
It's unforgivable. Nobody copes well with believing they're alone in the world and nobody is on their side or understands them.
The thing about taxes is it only works when you're a big fish in a small pond. Amazon Fulfillment Center doesn't have to pay taxes to the small Arkansas municipal government they functionally own. But you can be fucking sure that the extremely white sheriff and his Good'ole'Boy deputies won't tolerate a tax payment showing up late when it's the low-income black neighborhood Amazon Fulfillment Center workers who are on the hook.
That is, after all, the agreement between the city and the business. The city budget doesn't come from the company coffers, it comes from the salaries of the employees' paychecks. Rents are for Little People.
I agree. We should really start centralizing some of that so Multi National Corporations can't just buy a town.
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.
usually abuse and neglect comes from generational poverty.
Worst bullying I dealt with was when I went to a (not cheap) private school, so I don't think that's all that relevant.
Yeah, it is generally considered to be a bad thing.
It teaches the younger and weaker kids that they cannot expect administrators to act in their interests.
It teaches the older and meaner kids that they can act with impunity, safe in the assumption that administrators will look the other way.
The lesson is two-fold, and the end result is a cycle of bullying as the younger kids grow up knowing they can punch down without consequences.