Bully for me (a little long)

Heck, I wouldn’t defend our principal for a moment. I’m only recalling our childish attitude toward him. As we got older, he became less amusing.

One reason in particular: The man was a physical coward. As soon as boys reached puberty, he stopped the hands-on bullying. That was odd, because, even though we were big rugged farm kids and would both take and give a licking, he could have pulverized any ten of us. I think he was the purist form of sadist I’ve ever encountered.
 
What shocks me more than anything is that fellow teachers didn't do anything. So no one else would take the job, so? Fire him anyway. I'm shocked he wasn't murdered during the entire time he worked there....

I mean, I've seen apathetic communities plenty, but I've never had the experience of ones so utterly willing to turn a blind eye, and not only that, accuse anyone saying such things as "lying".

This sounds like a job for a camera!
 
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I was bullied when I was 12 for being a born-again Christian (well I did walk around the playground reading my New Testament instead of playing) and having a dead father.

When we moved to the big city when I was 15, I attended the local comprehensive school for a few weeks until I was beaten up for asserting that neither Jesus nor Cleopatra were likely to have had white skin. I never went back. Their loss, frankly.
 
tkingdoll said:
When we moved to the big city when I was 15, I attended the local comprehensive school for a few weeks until I was beaten up for asserting that neither Jesus nor Cleopatra were likely to have had white skin.
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Now there's a celebrity power couple! Just a few decades and a few hundred miles different, and history would have been a lot more interesting. Sermons such as "Turn the Other Bosom" and "Asp Not What Your God Can Do For You" and "It's Easier For A Camel To Pass Through The Eye Of A Needle Than To Get Marc Antony To Stop Calling" and "Render Unto Caesar That Fine Booty" would have made a world of difference in Christianity. And they'd never have crucified him, either, because he'd just pull the old rolled-up-in-the-carpet, nothing-to-see-here-officers trick, and turn up weeks later with Cleo in Namibia, shopping for photogenic orphans to adopt.

Of course there would have been a few problems along the way. I doubt Cleopatra would have had much in common with a mother-in-law who was an immaculate holy virgin, and frankly, her family wasn't much to brag about either. But with love, all things are possible. Just look at Nick and Jessica. Not now, obviously. But two years ago.
 
tkingdoll said:
I was bullied when I was 12 for being a born-again Christian (well I did walk around the playground reading my New Testament instead of playing) and having a dead father.
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Whatever one's opinion of religion (and mine isn't a very high one to put it mildly), that's no excuse. From what you describe you were still minding your own business. Sometimes that's enough of a reason for people to not like someone though...

When we moved to the big city when I was 15, I attended the local comprehensive school for a few weeks until I was beaten up for asserting that neither Jesus nor Cleopatra were likely to have had white skin. I never went back. Their loss, frankly.
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Which big city was this? At any rate, sounds like either racism or religious zealotry at work (maybe both). Glad you got out of there.
 
I made a post about my own experiences but the forum ate it. Oh well.

The short version, I was bullied like some others in this thread were, and my experience with the reactions of parents and teachers is so similar that repeating it all would be monotonous. Even writing a detached note like this one about it still calls up a strong physiological response of hatred and adrenaline.

I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of "anti-bullying" initiatives, since I think the worst offenders are very thick and have horrible lives at home, and no amount of dot points or meetings will fix those issues. The only solution is to prevent the offenders from having access to victims, which is not possible while we still have the combination of compulsory schooling and a university system that tends to stream the least capable tertiary students into Education. (There are always bright and driven people who go into Education of their own accord, but even they have to admit they are a minority).

Teachers will say "We're teachers, not prison guards", which is of course perfectly true. They aren't trained to be prison guards and they did not sign up to be prison guards. The problem is that juvenile criminals need prison guards or the equivalent, and they don't have them.
 
My older brother used to try to bully me but I had my ways of getting even with him. I couldn't beat him up but he couldn't beat me up either so I got him back with psychological warfare and hidden stuff like using his toothbrush to clean the toilet etc. I had a hot temper and wasn't the kind of person civilized people wanted to know much less if I was angry. I used to talk to him and carefully push his buttons getting him more and more angry almost to the point of fighting with me then I would calm him down and placate him and turn around and get him angry again and keep doing this till he realizes what I am doing, then we fought. Or I would say something knowing that he would use take the other side of the argument and then I would present him a series of logical arguments which he had to agree with me that they were true till finally he agreed that what he said initially wasn't true only once he realizes what I did, we fight. Or sometimes I would just do something and frame him for it. We are good friend now :)
In high school a bully caused me some grief. Our school had classes where grades 9 through 12 were sometimes in the same class. This guy was a class ahead of me and he walks into the classroom and thumps me on the temple with his knuckle. It really hurt and once I recovered a little I jumped up and tried to pick a fight with him but the teacher saw me and not him and I got in trouble but he did not. So I tried to return the favor the next day and the next day but he was expecting it and the teacher was too so I got in trouble again. Finally I realized I would never be able to get even till he relaxed so I spent the next two months getting him to think I was not interested in getting even. Then one day I walk in the classroom and he was in the back of the classroom and no one was behind me and he did not see me come in and the teacher was busy up front. I think "perfect!" So I walk by him and smack him upside his head with my knuckle and quickly sit down at the desk in front of him. He slumped over and fell to the floor unconscious so I raise my hand and call the teacher and tell her that something is wrong with him. She comes over and makes sure he is breathing and then wakes him back up by shaking him. He is clueless what happened and so is sent to the school nurses station to be checked out. I never told him what happened.
I had another bully pick a fight with me where I couldn't back down. He was well known so the whole school showed up to watch the fight. I fought with him but he wasn't a very good fighter. I am not sure if I could have beat him up but he wasn't going to hurt me however if I beat him up he had several brothers that I would have to fight so i decided to take a dive. We threw a few blows and I tried to let him hit me but it took a while before he landed a reasonable shot to my abdomen and I buckled over and lay down on th ground. Then he asked me if I had enough and I said yes then he offered to be my friend. It was the tradition if you beat someone up then it was your job to look out for them after that. Weird but dose wuz da rules.

I am much more tolerant of people these days and more likely to find peaceful ways to deal with others.
 
Lengthy again, but you know me

Dark Jaguar and LL:

Thank you for asking questions about my account of our strange school principal. Some people would frankly disbelieve such a bizarre tale.

About the other teachers: They wanted to keep their jobs, simple as that. Also, they hit and manhandled us kids too, because this was the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and corporal punishment, especially in “traditional” societies (and Wyoming was and still is pretty much the Old West), was perfectly okay. How else could you wrangle them little savages, goddanggit?

That touches on the seeming apathy of the community. People expected their school to discipline children; see above about the uses of violence on little limbs of Satan. I think I’d call it acceptance as much as apathy. (The fact that some of the fathers and older brothers had once taken their knocks from the Bull complicates the picture. Maybe they regarded an ear-wrenching or being hurled into the wall as a normal rite of passage?)

Also, the community was extremely small, just a few hundred people spread over a region of the earth that would swallow a small country. Life was hard – poverty in the Goose Creek Valley is comparable to the Mississippi Delta – and most parents’ attention was concentrated on getting by. When kids got off the school bus they were put to work, and tales about the Bull were not needed or wanted.

I know a man in his mid-seventies, a fellow-survivor of Big Horn School, who maintains a flame of anger against Warren Willard. It burns bright to this very day.

I think I can say that our school principal, now several decades in his grave, has passed into legend – and I deplore that, and hope to keep the bald facts alive with essays like this one.
 
Been bullied from 3rd to 10th grade. I´m not in the mood to go into details. Got the usual useless advice from parents.

There is, however, a happy memory... well two actually.

The first is, I was riding the bus to school, with two of the bullies right next to me; this must have been 5th or 6th grade. They kept taunting me over and over; I was pretty easy to upset, but physically weaker than either of them, and a whiner and a coward, I have to admit.
Then, for some reason, I said "Stop it, or else..."
They laughed. "Or else... what?"
"Or else, I´m gonna hit you."
"You - and which army?"
At that point, somehow I just snapped, and punched one of them on the nose - just hard enough for it to start bleeding.
You should have seen the look on their faces; I guess nobody ever tried to resist them, judging from how they were whining about the one guy having been punched. It´s really a pity, looking back at it, that this happened on the way home, instead of on the way to school; *nobody* at school would have believed them if they explained the bleeding nose by saying that I, of all people, had punched one of them.
By the way, neither of them ever attended a class re-union; I like to think that´s because they are afraid of me.

The other thing is, a while later, after one of the abovementioned bullies had left school, the other had taken to extorting money from me; since "accidents" could happen during cooking classes or PE, his threats were credible enough to me. After a while I worked up the courage to tell a teacher about this, who, oddly enough, didn´t just ignore this as teachers usually do. Shortly thereafter, I was cited before the headmaster, who was meeting with the bully´s father, the bully himself, the teacher I had told about this, and two of my classmates. It turned out I hadn´t been his only victim, and he´d been trying to earn a little tax-free extra to supplement his lunch money. The bully´s family was of middle-eastern origin, and I didn´t know a word of Farsi (still don´t), but I have to say I still enjoyed listening to the bully being verbally cut to pieces by his father in front of his victims.
 
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