I read the OP post, he did nothing that a lot of us wouldn't have done. It's easy to judge the actions of one person when you are not in his shoes. Last year my nephew was bullied to the point his grade was very affected, twice the cops went to his school but it changed nothing. He was bellied everyday by the same group of punks, the principal refused the send him in another school and the teachers were too cowards to act. I said to him several times that he had to beat the crap out of them or they'll always bully him, that it wasn't important if they suspended him from school. He finally got one and put a good fight, since then they never looked at him again.
Teach her that boys have testicles, and that it REALLY hurts when they get kicked in them. It's the only way to be sure.
I was bullied intensely, because I had a genetic condition, none of us knew what it was, but it was different. Kids do that. When I got older, it became about my race, and it got nastier. It reached its peak (so to speak) when a group of kids dragged me from the hall and beat me with folding chairs in the gym with a teacher's approval. I had asked out a white girl. I spent some time in the hospital, it broke a LOT of ribs, and though I went back to school soon the general consensus was that I deserved it. Fast forward a few years. I'm now in college, and I ended up watching someone about to receive the same kind of treatment (they were my age, before you start) and I went nuts. For those that know what krav maga is, I went nuts essentially being a lethal weapon. The guy was hurt terribly, and his Miata had to be written off. All done by hand. But after that I changed. The fact that nobody who was watching would speak out against me saved me that time. But it made me think hard about why I did it, and what I would do in the future. Now I talk to a lot of people I grew up with who are ashamed of how they acted, and I am quick to forgive and find out how much we had in common, and the ones that aren't are quickly excised from my life. I control who I give power to, and I won't give it to someone who wants to take it from me. Did mean I cut 95% of my family out. Turns out that they were instructing some people to do some of it to make me be how they wanted me to be. They would have had me be a stupid Ameritard for sure, and throw away my mind completely.
I know the feeling of being bullied, especially when it's because you're different. I spent pretty much every other day of Primary school alternately getting the living daylights beaten out of me and beating the living daylights out of the one responsible, usually more the former than the latter. Looking back now; I don't feel ashamed of my actions, I was simply making the best of a bad scenario, while my parents were (And still are) incredibly supportive: the school couldn't care so long as they still got the Special Needs allowance for the year, which resulted in more than one occasion of my parents being called to apologize on my behalf when I grabbed the one responsible and had some revenge. I still see the person, now man, that was at the reason I became like this, we never talk, barely exchange glances, but we both know the other. I don't even feel angry at him anymore, which surprises me, simply amused that he still hasn't managed to move on, that he's stuck and has pretty much shafted himself by failing school, never going to college and getting involved with the wrong people. Plus there's the knowledge that even his mother eventually got tired of his antics and kicked him out, the same woman who protested often infront of the Head Mistress that her little darling could never do anything wrong, even though there was my blood on his knuckles.
They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. A-****ing-men to that. It's so true though. Through all of the hurt and anguish I've actually come out of it able to take pretty much anything. I mean don't get me wrong I would never thank any one for hardening me mentally but hey, it's a positive way to look at it I suppose. Over the past few years my psychologist has tried CBT with me numerous times. It's always hard for me tbh. Bless him though, he's not one to quit. But what he did teach me that actually sort of worked was how you should just stop yourself stressing, take a few deep breaths and then put things in a box and visualise locking down the lid. Apparently it's a widely used technique. I must admit though that reading about it in the follow up to The Shining made me chuckle Stephen King has had CBT, then And oddly enough it actually works with me unless I'm manic and completely lose my senses.
@OP, Good for you, some people deserve all they get. I was not overly popular at school, I would be labelled a geek today but the odd thing was I was a mechanical geek and was obsessed with motorcycles, engines and engineering and as many young boys like bikes and cars I never understood why some kids thought it odd and I still don't? I hadn't been at secondary school for long when I was bullied for the first time ever, a kid just grabbed a bike mag I had and ripped it up and threw the bits at me, smacked me in the face and walked off, I just stood there unable to understand what was going on, it didn't make any sense, why did he do that? Being into bikes I read a lot of bike mags and then I found a book called "Chopper" by Peter Cave and discovered the sub-culture of biking and bikers and I thought, that's me, not the ultra violent thug that the book was about but the attitude, "Treat me right and I'll treat you better, treat me wrong and I'll treat you worse" I have kind of lived by that mantra ever since. I had been riding bikes off road since I was ten years old and fallen off many times and had no real fear of pain or getting hurt so the thought of getting hurt in a fight didn't bother me and when the same kid tried to bully me again in the school cloakroom I grabbed a huge trainer off a shelf and beat him across the face with it, he dropped me like a stone and I still remember the look of shock on his face, he went away shouting his mouth off but never touched me again, a few other bullies tried over my school years but I had found my identity and had what I considered the biker mentality, I was a kid then and I now realise it's nothing to do with being a biker it's just a mentality, a way to deal with some people when the need arises, leave me alone and no one gets hurt, try and bully me and I go full on. I heard about an old school friend, he was the pretty boy type that all the girls loved and sailed through school with no problems, never bullied and never a bully, after leaving school he trained in various martial arts and became an instructor and then bizarrely he started bullying people and throwing his weight around, he was eventually jailed for GBH and thrown out of the martial art associations he was a member of, some people I'll never understand?
Simples: he started drinking his own Kool-Aid. If you're always popular and experience easy success (rather than the hard-won, hard worked for success) it can go to your head a bit. You can get a sense of entitlement because nothing and nobody sets any boundaries on you. Popularity and easy success, like power, corrupt. We all need challenge and defeat occasionally, to keep us grounded and real.
Actually, it kinda sounds like he deserved it. It's one of the confusing things (to me) about our society's prevailing outlook that regardless of how cruel someone is to you, if you hurt them for it, you're in the wrong. I think aggression is a reasonable reaction to cruelty, and I don't think free speech should be distorted to mean that anyone can be as awful as they like to other people without consequences. Hurting him as much as you did was probably excessive, but he and his peers pushed you to it for years with torment; just as a person who throws a rock high into the air and then doesn't move deserves, in some sense, to be hurt when it lands on them, a person who torments somebody else mercilessly deserves, in some sense, the damage that person eventually visits on them. He could have repented, shown empathy, lightened up or backed off at any point during your school years and at any point afterwards, up to when you met again; he didn't. He threw the rock as high as he could and proudly refused to move. I'm glad you did it. For victims everywhere, however inconvenient the consequences were and however conflicted it made you feel, I think it was interpersonal justice, even if the law had nothing useful to say either way.
There are those who praise and those who scorn what I did here but I do deeply regret it. I Shouldve walked away, ignored it. However, after all these years he's walked around thinking he's done no wrong and twisted that knife he and nearly all of the male population of my year planted earlier. I couldn't walk away with him thinking he had the upper hand still, I wanted him to know the pain he started and aggravated. It was excessive, but I'm never going to go down that road again.
You do realise that you could actually be this dick hole's Karma, right? IE - if he's managed to avoid a slap for being a ****** in the past then you may well have been the one that will bring it all home? Let's put it this way. With a lovely broken nose as a souvenir I can bet you my anal virginity that he won't tell any one else he's not sorry for what he did to them in the past. I bet he'll whince every time he thinks about it. Now my uncle was a hard *******. He used to sort out our family problems, should any one take the piss. He once told me that even if I took a pounding then I should always try and leave them something. You know? like a bite, broken nose... That way when they think about starting something with you again they'll think otherwise. No one likes pain !
I'm Caucasian and Seminole, roughly 50/50. As a halfbreed around here (the most polite term I still hear) in small town Alabama things can still be tough. The difference now is I own who I am and I'm proud of it, and people respect that, even if they don't like the idea of a halfbreed. This is a place with a sizable neo-Nazi concentration and a branch of the Klan that are separate from each other. A black man was dragged to death in '99 for dating a white woman. I heard his screams all the way at my house from where it happened. Many places would just say "that's awesome that you're that much Native" but here it's "we don't like your kind, woods ni**er." Or at least the older ones are that way. More of my generation are better about it. I still could have slapped the person that told us that we were lucky that you could barely see any Injun in my son and that we were lucky for that-just think of what it would be like if he looked like me. These words are my reality. Here on the net we're all just text, and therefore equal. How I wish real life were that way.
Thread about geeks on a gaming/computer forum all talking about the one other thing we have had in common. Who would have thought! lol! The few of us at school who had to deal with those arse hats on a daily basis, all went to University and are doing pretty well for themselves now. Nothing makes me happier than returning to my home town to see family and past friends only to see the same old characters who were bullies continue to struggle in their pathetic lives. After university I moved home for a brief period of time like many, and whilst out on a Thursday night for a quiet chat over snooker and beer with two good friends, a said arse hat turned up and tried to repeat his "good old days". What he failed to notice is I'm older and much bigger now. It did not end well, but we did help him to the toilets to help pack his nose with toilet paper.
So true, my life got messed up quite early on due to both my parents dying within four years of each other and having no home by the time I was 19 but I survived and it brings a wry smile to my face when I see some of the local tough guys I had problems with years ago still sitting around the town drinking themselves stupid and getting banged up on a regular basis, not many of the big plans I had when I was younger came to fruition but I have at least avoided addictions and pretty much stayed out of trouble and prison unlike many I know. I'm no PC guru, I trained as a mechanic but when I think that I have learnt to use and build computers whilst the usual suspects have done nothing but hang around drinking, doing drugs and committing crimes, I know who I would rather be. Sounds simple when you put it like that and your probably right, thinking about him now he was always rather full of himself.
