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My experience was a little different. First of all, my parents and my sister were all bullies, so there was no safe space at home or really anywhere but the library or the woods. My problem was that I believed what I had been taught in Sunday School--Jesus said "If thine enemy strike thee upon thy cheek, turn and offer him the other." It was only later when I learned about hypocrisy that I realized that no one really believed that.
As a tiny, brainy, underage student during desegregation in the 1960s, I bought into the peaceful non-violence practiced by the Freedom Riders who came through Mississippi. Because I was friendly with the black children, the biggest, meanest bully of the school, who was huge and overage, came up to me on the yard in seventh grade with a group of his lackeys to call me the worst thing he could think of. When he called me a n!gger lover, I just looked up at him and said "Jesus said to love everyone. Don't you?"
I don't fully recall what happened after that, but they must have walked away thinking that I was weirder than they had thought, because they did not attack me physically. I have never been in a fight with anyone but my sister. I still believe in peaceful resolution to interpersonal conflicts, and I used the same technique several times, even into my adult years.
So it is possible to neither fight back, nor run away. I have always stood my ground and stood for what is right. If someone wants to fight me, they will not succeed, because I will not fight back. I still don't understand why people want to teach their children to be Christians, but not to follow the teachings of Christ. I probably never will.
What are you talking about - children must learn to interact properly with situations. How we ever win a war or have s man protect his family if never stood his ground? Better read Old Testament
Yes it was... The bully and a number of their friends would gang up on the victim.
In my school, the jocks were the worst offenders, they were also treated as heroes because they could play football.
Of course excuses were made. All the victim had to do was fight back and the bully would respect them for it. No the reality was the Bully and his or friends would continue the abuse until they found a new victim.
Exactly. These goofballs who think that beating the crap out of somebody ended it either had unique experiences in life or just romanticizing the past to some sad version of a bad Western. I had plenty of bullies to deal with, and I beat the crap out of most them... and they just kept coming back for more, often with more buddies. That's just the way it was, and it only ended when the thugs got old enough to potentially face legal action and/or became distracted chasing women in high school. Beating the crap out of them didn't end anything because they'd just be right back there a week later, making trouble and picking fights again.
It is utterly pathetic listening to people trying to excuse this crap. I don't know if they are just anarchistic nuts who want to live in a "might makes right!" society, where violence is everywhere and anyone can shoot anyone at any time on a whim, or if they just are honestly completely blind to what really goes on in schools when it comes to bullies and lack the ability to understand how living in an environment of constant fear and potential violence is not healthy or just at all.
Coincidentally, the PBS News Hour is airing a segment right this minute on an anti-bullying program started by the Sandy Hook parents. The link is not yet available. It is apparently an effective intervention. Ferguson High School in Miami was featured.
bullies find kids that won't fight back. if they know you'll fight back, they'll leave you alone
Problem is that school policy today targets kids that do fight back which indirectly encourages bullying. I was bullied in school and didn't fight back, but a big part of the reason for that was I didn't want to face the consequences for fighting, which at my school was suspension and taking a huge hit on my grades.
Problem is that school policy today targets kids that do fight back which indirectly encourages bullying. I was bullied in school and didn't fight back, but a big part of the reason for that was I didn't want to face the consequences for fighting.
Zero tolerance is a moral abomination since it rewards the thug indirectly - his target still suffers - and teaches students to distrust any form of law enforcement, the consequences of which we're seeing today, a generation or so after zero tolerance came into play.
I don't understand why this is so difficult for some people to grasp. The standards of behavior in a school should be no different than those anywhere else in civilized society. You don't disband the police and just let muggers and victims slug it out in the streets (the "back in mah day, we just punched them out!" mindset), nor do you create an insane police state where muggers and victims receive the same punishment, facts be damned (the zero tolerance mindset.) If our overall civilization was run following either mindset, our nation would have collapsed less than a year into such an idiotic experiment. It should be no wonder why our kids are screwed up giving the laws under which they must operate.
I went to an all- girls private school for the majority of high school (late 90s-early 00s), so I'm by no means a baby boomer.
However, to those who seem to view bullying as a just a physical act (such as beating), wherein the victim just needs to learn to punch back, and any other torment as something the snowflakes just have to 'suck up'...
I would be interested to know your albeit belated advice about what you think I should have done back in High School when faced with the following scenarios:
•My regular uniform getting urinated on while I was in P.E
•Multiple people's defecations in my sleeping bag on school camp
•Dead reptiles in my locker and school bag
•Death threats on notes slid into my locker
•Drugs planted in my locker
•Used womens sanitary items put into my locker and school bag
•Calling from payphones at night and on weekends, threatening me and my family
•And another occurrence much worse than any of the above that I won't go into right now
•etc etc etc. For years.
The issue was this - I knew who the group of girls who were responsible were. I genuinely think that even the school knew. But by the time I did report it all, even though it was still an ongoing issue, I kept getting told that there was no proof that these particular girls were the ones doing it.
Unless an eye witness (other than myself) was willing to come forward, nothing would be done. Obviously, nobody was willing to.
Chances are though, that if I had even attempted to replicate any of what they did to me, and did it back to them, I probably would have been in huge trouble. Verbally confronting them (which I did), was met with a lot of giggles, shrugs and denials of any knowledge.
So, I'm genuinely curious... what should I have done?
Your article said boomers deserted at twice the rate of the people who fought in Vietnam.
Uh, the boomers fought in Vietnam. Duh.
And you say that the Vietnam War desertion rate was high. Well, yeah. It was an unpopular war, from a soldier's point of view, because the politicians wouldn't allow them to win it, but at the same time they were dying in the tens of thousands.
And people were drafted to fight it.
We ought to have a draft for you millennials and see how you like it.
American soldiers in Vietnam never lost a battle. The politicians wouldn't let them build off those wins to finish the enemy off. That's just one reason why the war was unpopular. Another was the ingratitude shown to the soldiers when they came back home. The military eventually fell apart in the mid-seventies, and it took a while to get people to want to join up again.
58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, not 5,000 as in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a war where you went out in small patrols into the countryside and tried to get the enemy to attack you. You were basically human bait. You didn't fight with tanks and other heavy vehicles in the desert, you fought with rifles in the jungles and mountains. No one who knows anything about the history of the Vietnam War would ever question the bravery of the boomer soldiers who fought it.
That's your history lesson for today, snowflake. Credit to the other boomers here who ignored your posts.
Last edited by dechatelet; 12-13-2017 at 03:29 AM..
Yup ,me to.Thing I have found out getting older and talking to others at reunions and such.Some kids thought they were bullied when they really weren't,they just had low self esteem and seem to imagine it more than it really happen. Please remember I said some, of course not all case's.
Were there campaigns to end bullying? Were kids told to just deal with it and "man up?" I'm asking in light the whole Keaton controversy, but that's another topic.
The only way to deal with bullying was to stand up for yourself. It might have even meant you would get beat up, but afterwards would be left alone in favor of prey that wouldn't fight back. For the most part this was very true. Even if you did lose the fight, getting at least a few good licks in was enough for a bully to not want to repeat the experience.
In a lot of way, bullying today is different from bullying in 60s, and in a lot of ways it's more difficult to combat.
But the answer is still, basically, the same: You must stand and resist.
I can't tell a 16-year-old facing 2017 bullies what "stand and resist" looks like today, but "stand and resist" is still the answer.
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