A Video About Bullying

[lumpenprol]

I took a second try at the vid and it actually gets better once the initial violin assault is over and he starts talking about people other than himself.

 

hasn't it been shown in studies that bullies are often of above average intelligence?

 

I think the ones who bullied me were. A combination of intelligence (ability to read and manipulate others) combined, probably, with some degree of dysfunctional home life (that makes it easy for them to emulate abusive adult behavior, and gives them the emotional push to do so).

Bullying *does* suck, but learning how to deal with it is part of life (as many people here have said). I remember getting into a fight with one of my bullies in the school gym after I had come out of swim class, I got him all wet lol. He didn't fuck with me after that.

[lumpenprol]

thinking about this more, I think vids like this may do more harm than good, as they seem easy to ridicule.

I do think bullying is a problem, but I'd like to see a vid more along the lines of adults talking very frankly about how they dealt with bullying.

 

My grandfather, for example, finally threw a rock at his bully's head and sent him to the hospital. That always inspired me, though I never did the same.

[SR4]

its a poet. reciting a poem.

 

is it really that necessary to deconstruct?

[Guest zaphod]

Columbine high school in Littleton, CO back in April 1999. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Why did they kill a bunch of other kids and then themselves? Because they were bullied to the breaking point. There are numerous other examples of the repercussions of bullying, but I think you get the gist.

 

i hate to "play the race card" here, but: i'm of mixed race, asian and white, and was actually attacked once in middle school, beaten up and told that i should learn to speak english (i was born in the united states, english is my first language). i got called every racial epithet you can think of, often by asian people. my first day of middle school, at a new school after my parents moved, i immediately sat down at a lunch table of southeast asian kids. one of them called me a chink and told me to leave. i'm not chinese. if you're not fully something, you're usually ostracized from every group. i was also fairly nerdy. "bullying" was just a part of life. you either fight back physically, which i've done maybe twice in my life, or you develop a quick wit, or you do a lot of drugs. i went through all of these phases, with varying success rates. this actually changed in high school, when i lucked out and got a pretty laid back, open minded class, with a pretty diverse cultural background. i think some of the culture of school was starting to change at that point as well, and it simply wasn't "cool" to pick on people.

i was in high school when columbine happened. watching the news, it was fairly obvious that harris and klebold were two weak, badly parented, delusional sociopaths. their actions were the result of their own inability to function or deal with a situation that basically everyone goes through. i'm sure their cases of being bullied were mild in comparison to some. they had plenty of ways out, the path they took was pathetic.

and this video is kind of pathetic too. it's pitiful. i have no sympathy for this guy. creating a comforting blanket of words to protect yourself from the harsh reality of life is a poor way to live.

[ambermonk]

I see where you're coming from Zaphod, but I stand by my statement. Harris and Klebold probably could have had a better upbringing, but I still won't deny that being bullied was a factor in what motivated them to kill.

[zazen]

You do need to get some shit thrown at you when you're a child. Kids need to develop a thick skin.

 

People are selfish twats and if your too much of a pushover, you'll get walked on throughout your whole life.

 

Not saying bullying is ok, just saying that if a person doesn't deal with confrontation in their youth then it's probably gonna be harder for them to deal with it in adulthood.

 

I see what you're saying there - School is a microcosm of later life and so you're getting trained to deal with adversity etc.

 

But when I think about it, since leaving school I've never encountered anything like the shit I had to put up with in school. And I don't consider myself to have been bullied really, just had to occasionally deal with people who were bullies (as it were).

 

I have never had to deal with such a close-knit and verbally agressive insensitive bunch of people as when I was at school, aged about 10 to 14. I've very rarely encountered adults that were as rude, agressive, or vindictive as 12 year olds. And if I have, I've been able to just walk away from them, I wasn't stuck with them as a peer group.

 

Perhaps I've just been lucky since. But I'm wondering: if school is actually a much worse version of later life, why put kids through it?

[awepittance]

is there a 'where is my bully now?' web database? If not there should be one

[awepittance]

thinking about this more, I think vids like this may do more harm than good, as they seem easy to ridicule.

 

I do think bullying is a problem, but I'd like to see a vid more along the lines of adults talking very frankly about how they dealt with bullying.

 

My grandfather, for example, finally threw a rock at his bully's head and sent him to the hospital. That always inspired me, though I never did the same.

a similar bit of inspiration happened to me and probably also turned me off from fighting at an early age. I had an older friend, maybe 2-3 years older who lived across the st. He went to my elementary school and was mostly a loner, hanging out with a kid who was 3 years younger than him after school was cool with him, but im sure it made him feel like a loser to be hanging out with me in front of his peers. One day a kid from my class, who was a wigger at age 9 (in a middle-upper class suburb, he was not from the streets) started calling this very skinny tall 3 years older friend of mine 'fat albert'. Like screaming it at him with a group of his own friends from my grade. He ignored them and kept walking but they wouldn't let up, the kid just kept yelling things behind him like 'why are you so fat'. The insult made no sense whatsoever. Something snapped in my friend, he grabbed the leader of the pack by the arm and swung him in a circle like a rag doll into a concrete pillar at full force. I have no memory of what happened afterwards except for being banned from hanging out with my friend from across the street for almost a whole month because he had given this kid a concussion, knocked him unconscious and put him in the hospital over night. Looking back on it it was a beautiful thing to watch, horrifying but extremely cathartic and satisfying.

Ironically, the same kid my friend put into the hospital would bully me on and off all the way until the end of highschool. I have no idea what he's doing now but part of me always wondered if getting beaten so badly at a young age had turned him more 'hard' over time. His bullying never bothered me too much because I would just always picture him with the giant purple welt on his face that he wore in shame after he came back from the hospital