Suicides due to "bullying". Are we just becoming a society of wimps?

[MercutioATC]

(Disclaimer: Yes, bullying is bad. No, I don't support it.)

My generation (I'm 42) made do without bicycle helmets, skateboard pads, or seat belt use (and what protected you if a car crashed was a lot of metal...no modern engineering, antilock brakes, or airbags).

We had to be home when the streetlights came on, but our parents didn't know where we were all day...and we didn't have cell phones to check in with.

We broke thermometers so we could play with the mercury (hell, our science teachers let us play with mercury in class).

We sat in restaurants and movie theaters...and at dining room tables...with smokers. Heavy smokers.

We'd play in the dirt and visit any number of public places without the benefit of hand sanitizer.

We were vaccinated for about half the stuff kids these days are vaccinated for.

...and many of us were bullied. We either learned to avoid the bullies, made friends with bigger kids, or ran fast. We also learned (the hard way) that "if you stand up to a bully, he'll back down" is generally bullshit.


The generation before us endured all of this and more.

The generation before them had all of that, plus a depression. They got jobs when they were 10 to help feed their families.



...and, these days, kids kill themselves if they get picked on in school.




The undesirability of bullying aside, is it possible that we're just becoming a society of wimps?

[lazarus]

1. yes n/t

[CreekDog]

220. We are wimpy because we don't have good enough reasons to commit suicide

or something, ask the OP.

:sarcasm:

[stevedeshazer]

227. I'm amazed at how similar this post is to this Freeper post.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1150005/posts

Astonishing.

[Bluebear]

280. Same author?

:evilgrin:

[JI7]

296. wow

[newfie11]

2. I agree! n/t

[asdjrocky]

3. Don't you think kids have always killed themselves because they are bullied?

Do you really think that's a new thing? Your argument may be better answered by the way you receive and interpret your information. You need more data.

[MercutioATC]

4. Frankly, no. I don't.

I'll allow that reporting and reality have become increasingly distant lovers, but this has only become an "issue" in the past 10 years or so.

[asdjrocky]

7. Do you really think there is something new under the sun?

Really?

[MercutioATC]

13. I don't...and that's my point. Bullies have always been there.

In my day, we lost a little blood and moved on. Apparently, some kids consider suicide an option now.

[asdjrocky]

19. And there has always been mental illness, and kids have always killed themselves.

Romeo and Juliet?

[LeftishBrit]

114. George Crabbe wrote at the turn of the 19th century..

Oh there's a wicked little world in schools
Where mischief's suffered and oppression rules,
Where mild quiescent children oft endure
What a long placid life shall fail to cure...


So 200 years ago, it was well known (a) that bullying in schools was a big problem; and (2) that it could permanently damage the victims' mental health.

Suicide in response to bullying is rare. I suspect that it is commoner now than in the past, not because people are 'wimps', but because in the past a teenager who found school intolerable for any reason could quit at the age of around 15 (and in Crabbe's time, of course, was not legally obliged to go to school at all). By the same token, older bullies could be expelled and schools were not obliged to teach them after around 15. Legal school leaving age, and the economic necessity of remaining at school, have both increased. Of course, children who left school early in the past were likely to spend their lives in relatively low-paid jobs - but at least there *were* jobs for them.

In any case, it's the wrong way round to look at things mainly in terms of "Why are some children such wimps that they end up committing suicide in response to bullies?" A better way to look at it is "Why are some children - and adults - such bullies? Is there a good way of preventing it?"



At any rate, looking

[Nikki Stone1]

123. +100

..

[lastliberalintexas]

243. Fantastic post

[AspenRose]

257. Yes!

"In any case, it's the wrong way round to look at things mainly in terms of "Why are some children such wimps that they end up committing suicide in response to bullies?" A better way to look at it is "Why are some children - and adults - such bullies? Is there a good way of preventing it?"



Why do we blame the bullying victim? The unspoken implication is that the victim did something to deserve it, or was somehow defective in not being able to prevent it. Good post.

[Kolesar]

21. Kids get called "fag" and commit suicide

Or "homo" in the bad old days in Ohio. Some homosexuals are so torn that they commit suicide as youth or young adults.

[blondeatlast]

59. Not now; it's always been that way. It was just swept undser the rug because

it was embarrassing for society to admit it.

The only thing that has changed is that we are more open now and suicide isn't always considered a failure of the parents or schools.

[fasttense]

The suicides from bullying were never identified as such.

I had a school mate, I barely knew her, who killed herself when I was in the 11th grade. Everyone said it was because she was depressed, but we all knew she was teased mercilessly, constantly. There even was a girl who left in the middle of the year for no apparent reason. I later found out it was simply to get away from the constant teasing.

We are no more or less wimpy than the next generation. It's just that suicide from bullies are now recognized as real.

Calling a suicide a wimp is heartless and rude. It's as if you are bullying them all over again. Blaming the victim has always been a fun game for Republicons. They are usually the bullies.

[tigereye]

144. I think some kids have much less supportive family structures now -

that might account for some of it. I'm not sure that the adolescent suicide data for the past 10 years is highly related to the effects of bullying per se, but then I haven't seen the stats recently. Certainly research says that it can play a part in the development of more serious problems for some kids. It doesn't hurt for schools to try to stop bullying and build more cooperation - bullying is probably as bad for the bullies themselves in the long run as for the bullied.

It may also be that now we notice more of the effects of bullying than we did in the past, and there is more publicity about the worst of those situations where kids had a history of being bullied and had access to guns to take it out on their peers, or themselves... Columbine, etc.


It is interesting to note that kids in the past were exposed to many more difficulties without benefit of anyone paying much attention to the effects of those difficulties. I have to admit when I see the newer playground equipment, I laugh a little to think of those metal monkey bars and concrete bases that we played on. But I also think that if fewer kids break their arms or get concussions now, that isn't a bad thing.

[Overseas]

124. Yes I do actually. Bullying has been glorified in reality TV shows.

I worried when I saw the emergence of these reality TV shows where people deliberately form false alliances with people and then turn on them to grab the millions. Those who could entice others to their side only to double-cross them later would win the games or get ahead. I don't watch those shows because I felt uncomfortable about their teaching people how to plot and scheme against one another.

Then there are the Bad Girls type shows. Where we watch people be bratty and catty and admire the bitchiest among them.

One could argue that those shows are popular because most people are not bullies and brats, so they are watching with morbid fascination.

But I wondered whether those plotting reality shows were promoted not only to defeat the writers' union with less scripted shows, but also to encourage people to fight as individuals against one another, rather than following kumbaya community sentiment. You only come together into alliances with others in order to defeat them in the end.

Survival of the fittest. Celebration and elevation of the cattiest. The bitchiest people raise the ratings, so they are honored in a way. Everybody knows their names. They're the contestants everyone loves to hate. We remember them longer after the shows have ended. Being obnoxious pays off.

There really has been a glorification of selfish obnoxious behavior. And I think it makes a difference that there are more fora in which to bully others-- those too afraid to do so in person can trash others virtually in all kinds of social networks these days.

There's also a lot of modern fun to be had in sharing humiliating video clips. When the mean kids tricked that new guy into eating dog biscuits it was just a laugh in their local circle; now it can be broadcast all over the place thanks to quick little phone cams.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall, who's the cruelest kid of all? Look look look at him/her take these guys down!

[Nikki Stone1]

127. +1

.

[Echo In Light]

155. Official Culture - A Natural State of Psychopathy?

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm

[Overseas]

176. Very interesting article.

I'd like to argue that the recent ramping up of Bullying Culture has been deliberately engineered to augment the psychopathic official culture because the sense of community is more innate than the privatizers would wish. We want the public option to free us and our fellow human beings from medical terror, so the privatizers need to ramp up death panel talk and pay millions to generate anti-government frenzy. Many of us understand that universal health care is a necessary, basic compassionate use of our tax money, so the right wingers have had to work overtime.

Many Americans recognize damage to our environment and don't want to bequeath an unlivable planet to their progeny, so the right needs to ramp up notions of communist totalitarianism and religious rapture to overcome those aspirations.

I will definitely reread the article more carefully, but I bristle a bit when solutions are based on individuals freeing themselves internally because we need massive changes in our society as a whole to occur more quickly than it would take for people to free themselves psychologically. And just as selfishness can be encouraged on a grand scale, so can understanding community and the commons.

But I was rereading The Armed Madhouse over the holidays and reminded of how very strong the psychopathy of our official culture really is. Fostering war for profit and all.

I do consider myself rather naive in many ways, even though I grew up overseas, questioning my country's policies from a young age. One of my poems at age 12 had the refrain-- "Peace will be found in the near future-- this is a recording." And I'm now over 50.

[hayu_lol]

14. Mercutio...agree completely.

Don't think too much of the last two generations. Life revolves around them to the exclusion of a 'real world' out there.

[blondeatlast]

82. I'm older than Mercutio. It's naive to think bullying suicides didn't happen. nt

[HelenWheels]

94. I disagree

I'm older than Mercutio, too, and I don't remember the word "fag" or "homo" being used and "gay" meant "happy." Yeah, we were bullied but more often than not an onlooker would intervene and stop the bullying. I was very small for my age and I never hesitated to take on the bully because I had a smart mouth. It's funny how bullies don't like to be laughed at.The problem now is no one wants to get involved.

[lukasahero]

135. I'm older than Mercutio and I was routinely called fag

My name is Leslie so you can imagine what fun the kids had with that. I am also small, female and smart so I was an easy mark.

I don't remember anyone ever stepping in to stop the bullying. In fact, I remember only myself stepping in to fights to stop them. Everyone else used to stand around, cheering and enjoying the show.

[TrogL]

184. I'm probably older than both of you and onlookers would encourage the bullying

Bullies were the teachers pets and the principal's best buddies (and probably enforcers).

[CreekDog]

225. Don't I know you from somewhere?

Max Bernard: "Lemme tell ya something --they always jump"

[Posteritatis]

237. Then you're impossibly naive and/or clueless about the subject

If you think that's anything new, as opposed to merely noticed for a change - it may come as a surprise, but something showing up in the news more often doesn't necessarily mean it's happening more often - you're fooling yourself.

Period.

[proud2BlibKansan]

56. I don't

It's just promoted by our media today. Time was the media wouldn't embarrass the family by telling us there was a suicide or giving the reason for it.

[HereSince1628]

5. Belittling the mentally ill is a sad way to start the morning.

It only goes to demonstrate that at least one member of your generation still doesn't "get" mental illness.

[HereSince1628]

30. Why not read this little note from the suicide and mental health association international?

It might give you something to weigh your opinion against.

http://suicideandmentalhealthassociationinternational.org/commptsdsym.html


Here is just a snip from it...

"Until recently, little (or no) attention was paid to the psychological harm caused by bullying and harassment. Misperceptions (usually as a result of the observer's lack of knowledge or lack of empathy) still abound: "It's something you have to putup with" (like rape or repeated sexual abuse?) and "Bullying toughens you up" (ditto). Armed forces personnel faced threats of being labelled with "cowardice" and "lack of moral fibre" (LMF) if they gave in to the symptoms of PTSD. In World War I, 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers were shot as "cowards" and "deserters" on the orders of General Haig in an act which today would be treated as a war crime - see separate page on this injustice.

In the UK at least 16 children kill themselves each year because they are being bullied at school. This figure is established in the book Bullycide: death at playtime. Each of these deaths is unnecessary, foreseeable, and preventable. The UK has one of the highest adult suicide rates in Europe: around 5000 a year. The number of adults in the UK committing suicide because of bullying is unknown. Each year 19,000 children attempt suicide in the UK - one every half hour. in the UK, suicide is the number one cause of death for 18-24-year-old males. Females also attempt suicide in large numbers but tend to use less successful means."

[tigereye]

147. thanks for the info!

[Sanity Claws]

6. I'm more inclined to ask if we're a society of bullies.

[Douglas Carpenter]

11. I think that should be the more relevant question

an act of suicide is pretty desparate. Suicide has many causes. I doubt that being a wimp is one of them

[Chemical Bill]

53. +1

[GreenArrow]

106. THAT is the real question

.

[lukasahero]

132. Exactly!

Thank you for making that point.

[chrisa]

166. A society of narcissists.

Consumerism and one-upmanship is making us mentally ill.

[liberal_at_heart]

192. +1

[JerseygirlCT]

212. yes, exactly. nt

[NashVegas]

286. I'm More Inclined to Say We Don't Know How To Deal With Emotional Issues

and instead insist on the over-use of logic.

[Smarmie Doofus]

8. Not sure that I agree; ( pretty sure I don't, actually ) but.....

>>>>We also learned (the hard way) that "if you stand up to a bully, he'll back down" is generally bullshit.>>>>

....I always wondered why and how people say the above and where this idea came from. ( i.e that the bully will back down).

[Tansy_Gold]

46. Bullies rarely back down

If they did, they wouldn't be bullies.

[JNelson6563]

224. It works in the adult world anyway

I've known a few adult bullies. Sure enough, when you finally stand up to them and call them on their awful behavior, watch the demeanor change and hear the flow of excuses. It works a bit differently in the world of children but, in my world, standing up to bullies often works.

FYI I'm a woman who weighs about 110# so it's not my intimidating build. ;-)

Julie

[The Gunslinger]

54. I know it didn't work with me......

[SOS]

96. Must have a full battle plan

When I was being bullied in junior high school, it got so bad I didn't want to go to school.
I took this advice of "if you stand up to a bully, he'll back down".
But I was smart enough to enlist allies and set a trap.

The bullies all ended up in ambulances with smashed collar bones and jaws.
My group got suspended for fighting.

Those bullies never bothered me again.

(I am not recommending this type of response , just relating that it worked at the time)

[Harry Monroe]

273. I was bullied as well and got so bad that I didn't want to go to school also

But I simply had enough one day and kicked the bully square in the balls. He never bothered me again!!

[dalaigh lllama]

99. Actually, that does work, or at least it did for me once.

As I think back to grade school days, I think the system worked better then. I can recall being bullied by older kids on the way home from school or by kids in gym class. In every case, my parents would either call the kids' parents or the school principal, and the bullying stopped.

I didn't run in to a bully again until I had a part time job during college at a nursing home and one of the aides decided I was fair game to harass. I was so miserable I almost quit, but I needed the extra money. One of the other aides -- a real tough cookie -- took me aside one day and gave me a talking to; she said the same aide had harassed her when she had first started and I just had to let her know I wouldn't put up with her sh*t. My attempts at simply ignoring the bully up to this point had of course been futile. Luckily, I got along well with everyone but the bully, so the next time she hassled me, I exchanged a chuckle at her expense with whoever was standing near. I did this a few times -- laughing at her with someone else whenever she tried her usual routine. To my amazement, she pulled me aside a few weeks later and apologized for her behavior and was pleasant to me thereafter. I always thought the whole incident would have been a fascinating social study.

[Tailormyst]

9. Schools don't help at all

If your child stand up to the bully and there is a fight, your kid will get suspended now too. My son is developmentally slow and up until high school was picked on mercilessly. If he reacted in any way, he was the one that would get in trouble. High school is much better, more diverse and he is actually making friends.

[phasma ex machina]

85. FWIW schools earnestly attempt to mitigate bullying.

My niece currently teaches at a K-2 school designed to separate younger elementary kids from older kids to reduce physical intimidation. Unfortunately the budget that funds this separation may take a hit to provide pensions to geezers who apparently need a few more pennies before they croak. :(

[TicketyBoo]

129. That depends on the school.

Some do; some don't. I think bullying is being recognized as a serious problem more frequently these days.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

149. Maybe some...

When we returned to the US and my daughters re-entered US public schools, there was bully who targeted my youngest daughter. School did nothing to address it despite repeated discussions. Finally my daughter, after being set up for an off campus beat down, dropped all three of her assailants. She was later criticized for negatively impacting the bullies' self esteem but no one bothered her again.

[zbdent]

10. I've noticed that, in general, a lot of kids who were bullies in school

(where they basically got a slap on the wrist for what are, in the real world, criminal acts ... assault, harassment, intimidation/blackmail/extortion, theft, etc) grew up to mouth the Republican mantra ... (and, quite often, the e-mail that this suspiciously sounds like) ... and, of course, they whine about how they don't get the break (of being born with dark skin and immediately put into suspicion for whatever???)

No wonder they worship John Wayne, who, as I found out after I grew up, really came off in the movies as just a plain bully ...

[davsand]

167. "...slap on the wrist for what are, in the real world, criminal acts..." EXACTLY!!

My daughter came home from school in tears after a boy body slammed her into a wall than stood over her and laughed while she cried. My first phone call was to the school. I explained to the administrator that they got a free pass that time, but that if ANY kid ever laid hands on my daughter again, my next call would be to police to file assault charges.

I also explained that the school is acting in loco parentis and their obligation is to protect my kid when she is in their care. Failure to protect her in the future was not acceptable and would result in a report to child protective services.

Schools claim "zero tolerance" but it seems to me that what they are factually practicing is "see no evil."



Laura

[Shrek]

12. Without question. n/t

[vi5]

15. There are so many more ways to bully....

I'm roughly the same age as you. Back then bullying was limited to name calling, maybe some pushing and shoving, and worst case scenario the few unregulated hours at school (lunch, recess, etc.) were difficult.

But now there are so many more ways to deceminate information and tarnish reputations and so many of them have a permanence which is actually quite frightening. In our day a public shaming was limited to at most the few hundred people in your school. Now reputations are savaged to as many people as can have access to the internet and can be kept for as long as people can maintain files and pictures and articles and what have you.

Back in our day one could always get by minimally through the tough times by just saying "When I get out of here I can go to a place where nobody knows me and nobody knows the stupid things I did or the horrible names I was called, etc." That type of escape is severly limited in this day and age.

And honestly while I have the same memories as you do about growing up, I'm not sure that all those were "better". I mean yeah, our parents and grandparents were tougher than we were because they had to go through world wars, and drafts, and the depression and all that. But I don't think any of us think our lives were or are so shallow and sheltered because we didn't have to face that stuff.

I would like a better life for my kids than I had. I agree some of the overprotectiveness of today is over the top, but the fact is if I can have my kids avoid some of the struggles I had to face either because of lack of awareness or lack of education on certain topics or because advances in science hadn't happened yet. There's no way I'm going to not do that for them just so that they're not "wimps" any more than I'm sure my grandparents wanted me to stand in a food stamp line or have to ration just so I didn't turn out "soft" or some such thing.

[Nikki Stone1]

125. Good point. When you're bullied on Facebook, there's nowhere to run

or to hide.

[edhopper]

16. hey tough guy

"We sat in restaurants and movie theaters...and at dining room tables...with smokers. Heavy smokers."
And half a million of you die every year from cancer.

[MercutioATC]

35. Ah, the obligatory anti-smoking poster

I'm not a "tough guy". In fact, I think I'm representative of my generation...just average.


...and I have a hard time believing that 500,000 of us die every year due to second-hand smoke.

[edhopper]

41. Oh, just secondhand smoke.

"Secondhand smoke contains over 50 known carcinogen (causes cancer) and causes lung cancer and heart disease in non-smoking adults. Evidence indicates that there is a 25% to 30% increase in the risk of coronary heart disease from exposure to secondhand smoke.

In 2005 it is estimated that secondhand smoke kills 3000 non-smoking adults from lung cancer, 46,000 from coronary disease and 430 newborns from sudden infant death syndrome. "

And I'm sure your parents thought you were a wimp for getting a Polio and Smallpox shot.

[Confusious]

101. You know what I finally figured out?

Not that you probably care, but they never tell you how much or for how long in these studies.

Ever other stud I've read, radiation, asbestoes, other studies, EPA studies, they have a set limit for exposure.

Smoking studies never do. Wonder why. You're not going to die the minute you come into contact with it.

Oh, and your numbers don't add up to half a million.

[edhopper]

137. the half a million was for all smoke related deaths

I posted again when the OP said he was referring to second hand.
As for not causing instant death (I guess you want to ignore SID form smoke)
There is this you can also ignore.

"Objective To determine whether there was a change in hospital admissions for acute myocardial infarction while a local law banning smoking in public and in workplaces was in effect.

Design Analysis of admissions from December 1997 through November 2003 using Poisson analysis.

Setting Helena, Montana, a geographically isolated community with one hospital serving a population of 68 140.

Participants All patients admitted for acute myocardial infarction.

Main outcome measures Number of monthly admissions for acute myocardial infarction for people living in and outside Helena.

Results During the six months the law was enforced the number of admissions fell significantly (-16 admissions, 95% confidence interval -31.7 to -0.3), from an average of 40 admissions during the same months in the years before and after the law to a total of 24 admissions during the six months the law was in effect. There was a non-significant increase of 5.6 (-5.2 to 16.4) in the number of admissions from outside Helena during the same period, from 12.4 in the years before and after the law to 18.0 while the law was in effect.

Conclusions Laws to enforce smoke-free workplaces and public places may be associated with an effect on morbidity from heart disease."

Second hand smoke can trigger heart attacks.

[Confusious]

236. Maybe the smokers didn't go to these places

and breathe the smoggy air from cars, so there are less heart attacks.

There always seems to be a lack of data, and a ratio does not a scientific study make.

[Kalyke]

172. The World Health Organization disagrees with you.

Would you believe that the real number is < 10% (see Appendix A)? Yes, a US white male (USWM) cigarette smoker has an 8% lifetime chance of dying from lung cancer but the USWM nonsmoker also has a 1% chance of dying from lung cancer (see Appendix A). In fact, the data used is biased in the way that it was collected and the actual risk for a smoker is probably less. I personally would not smoke cigarettes and take that risk, nor recommend cigarette smoking to others, but the numbers were less than I had been led to believe. I only did the data on white males because they account for the largest number of lung cancers in the US, but a similar analysis can be done for other groups using the CDC data.

You don't see this type of information being reported, and we hear things like, "if you smoke you will die", but when we actually look at the data, lung cancer accounts for only 2% of the annual deaths worldwide and only 3% in the US.**

When we look at the data over a longer period, such as 50 years as we did here, the lifetime relative risk is only 8 (see Appendix A). That means that even using the biased data that is out there, a USWM smoker has only an 8x more risk of dying from lung cancer than a nonsmoker. It surprised me too because I had always heard numbers like 20-40 times more risk. Statistics that are understandable and make sense to the general public, what a concept!

The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more. Some of the known risk factors include genetics, asbestos exposure, sex, HIV status, vitamin deficiency, diet, pollution, shipbuilding and even just plain old being lazy.16 When some of these factors are combined they can have a synergistic effect, but none of these risk factors are directly and independently responsible for "causing" lung cancer!

http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Editorials/Vol-1/e1-4.htm

[Missy Vixen]

168. I have residual respiratory issues from my father's chainsmoking

Does this make me less than "tough" as a result?

:eyes:

[Zoeisright]

206. You don't 'believe' or 'not believe' statistics and facts.

You either understand it or you don't. Obviously, you don't understand science. Or statistics. OR reality. So be a denier.

[Confusious]

239. As they say

there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

[CreekDog]

216. nice science you are relying there pal

:rofl:

[Harry Monroe]

270. Well, my sister-in-law recently became a victim of second hand smoke

Never smoked a day in her life, but her parents were heavy smokers. She was diagnosed with lung cancer 5 years ago and given only 2 years to live. She fought on bravely and she was with us another 3 years. She died earlier this month, so believe it and get your head out of your ass. People DO die from second hand smoke!!

[Kolesar]

17. I was mugged, had an arm broken and a tooth knocked out by bullies

Your nostalgia is bullshit.

[MercutioATC]

38. That must have been one rough school...

Was this a school incident, or are you expanding "bully" to general society?

[Odin2005]

18. Your an insensitive jerk.

[MercutioATC]

44. You're obviously pretty perceptive.

I prefer to think of it as critical thinking, but that's often perceived as insensitivity.

Are you taking issue with my statements in general, or am I "insensitive" just because somebody killed them self?

[Zoeisright]

207. It's 'themselves'.

If you're going to post a lot, try to use correct English.

[MercutioATC]

248. Ah, the ad hominem attack...

My spellchecker decided "them self" was appropriate and I didn't review it.

But you're right, that invalidates my entire claim :eyes:

[Harry Monroe]

275. Actually, if you want to go there it's "because someone killed one's self"

But hell, what do I know?

[sudopod]

285. Don't piss on our legs and tell us it's raining.

Critical thinking my ass. You knew exactly how well your old man rant would be received here. You are just stirring shit.

[ixion]

20. sounds like we grew up in the same environment...

I'm 45, and what you say rings true to me. There were scads of bullies in those days, and the cops weren't always called if so much as a punch was thrown. In fact, there were fights all the time and no one got arrested. Imagine that.

I'm not saying I approve of fighting. I took a defensive stance as a kid, first passive and later more aggressive.

I agree. In an effort to make every aspect of life "safe" we're becoming wimpified.

The phrase I use to describe this goes like: "This is not Disneyland. You simply cannot remove all the nasties from everyday life"

[Kolesar]

26. & some people relive it anonymously on the internet message boards

..many decades later.

[mmonk]

22. Our society lacks the basics of human empathy.

In fact, it lauds lack of empathy as a virtue.

[snagglepuss]

45. Exactly. Very well said.

:applause:

[The Gunslinger]

62. +1

It is a huge problem that is not addressed.

[rucky]

122. As illustrated in this thread. n/t

[StarfarerBill]

145. +1

[JerseygirlCT]

214. Far too often, this is true.

Kids who are raised to value empathy are often targeted for it. Hell, adults too.

[Solly Mack]

23. What makes you think kids didn't commit suicide "back" then...

because of bullying?

Suicide wasn't exactly something people talked about openly back then. I'm a little older than you, btw.

News didn't travel the internet like it does now. So those local stories wouldn't be widely known.

I don't know that kids didn't kill themselves because of bullying. But I do know that kids did kill themselves back then.






Source:CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, others listed on graph


The teen suicide rate increased from 5.9 per 100,000 to 11.1 per 100,000 between 1970 and 1994,12 before declining to 7.3 per 100,000 in 2003. Between 2004 and 2005, the suicide rate for teens ages 15 to 19 increased slightly, to 8.2 and 7.7 deaths per 100,000, respectively.

[phasma ex machina]

66. Interesting. Caveat: a quasi logarithmic x axis makes peak values more dramatic.

[Nikki Stone1]

131. But it doesn't destroy the logic of the argument.

It only affects the perception of it.

[tigereye]

154. what's even scarier is the amount of firearm related deaths in youth...

:(

[GreenPartyVoter]

204. Agreed

[surrealAmerican]

228. Thank you.

This is just the point I was going to make. We were not "better, stronger" children back then. Some of us did commit suicide due to bullying, but there was a social stigma that prevented parents from reporting this to the world.

Also, far more children died and suffered brain damage from the lack of bicycle helmets, seat belts and other common-sense safety measures. We got sick more often from breathing all that cigarette smoke, too.

[Silent3]

24. There's a difference between having a occasional run-in with a bully...

...and being one of the people who is a social outcast and has many such run-ins, and not a lot of support or sympathy from friends or family to fall back on. For some kids the best times in their lives don't get much better than the moments when they are simply left alone. Most of their social interaction when they aren't just left alone is being taunted, insulted, degraded, or even physically assaulted.

In fact, if you're in that kind of situation, and the best support you get is some smug asshole who doesn't know how bad it can really be giving you the "suck it up, kid!" line, suicide is going to looking even more tempting.

[MercutioATC]

52. I was beaten up 3 or 4 times a week at recess.

No permanent damage. Sometimes it was just getting getting shoved onto the ground and kicked, sometimes it was punches to the face.

I think that was probably more than most people's definition of an "occasional run-in"...and I never contemplated suicide.

[Silent3]

110. "No permanent damage"

That's the standard? Everyone should just "man up" and take it, so long as their beatings don't lead to "permanent damage"?

Besides, it looks like there has been permanent damage. You've turned into an insensitive asshole who lacks empathy for anyone who you don't think lives up to your standards of toughness.

At any rate, I sincerely doubt that you were actually beat up 3-4 per week, certainly not on an ongoing basis for year after year after year. At most I'd believe you went through a brief spell of beatings that frequent. Even the "wimps" you look down on, the kind that end up contemplating or even committing suicide, don't generally get beat up that often on any sort of ongoing basis. To get beaten that much for any extended period of time you'd have to be unusually indifferent to pain and humiliation, starting a bunch of those fights yourself, unusually desperate for social contact so that playing and socializing at recess mattered way more than avoiding being beaten, or pretty damn stupid for not figuring out at least some avoidance strategy to cut down on the frequency of such encounters.

You probably had more of a social support structure than a lot of the people who fall into the kind of despair and hopelessness that leads to thoughts of suicide. The way you glibly suggest making friends with someone bigger and tougher to protect you shows how little you understand about how hard it is for some people to make friends.

Do you really think it's "wimpy" to look forward at your own future, see nothing worth living for in that future, to begin to think of death as preferable to ongoing pain, alienation, humiliation, and rejection?

[nightrain]

117. but where did your rage/hurt go?

[spoony]

211. Judging by the OP, it was turned against other victims. nt

[ieoeja]

140. But did you care?

I knew guys who got bullied mercilessly because they, didn't quite enjoy it, but were okay with it. They respected the bad ass who was kicking them around, wanted to emulate them, but weren't big, or just mean, enough to bully anyone themselves. At most they might pick and tease targets for the bully.

Since most of the time there was noone around they could bully with impunity, they would end up knocking their little sidekick around instead. If you stepped in to protect the sidekick, you'd just piss him off, so you shrugged and ignored him getting his ass kicked. He may not enjoy it, but he'd obviously rather get his ass kicked than get the bully upset with him.

[LanternWaste]

193. I would hazard ...

I would hazard that when it comes to psychological damage done at an early age, more often than not, we absorb and internalize that damage to the point in which it becomes part and parcel of our identity thus denying us the ability to see the damage for what it really is.

The abused child who grows up and then becomes an abuser himself rarely feels that he has a problem of his own or damage in his own psyche.

[CreekDog]

217. did it affect your personality?

:evilgrin:

[lastliberalintexas]

246. I don't know if you can say that, given this thread

Not knowing you, I certainly can't say for certain, but this thread reeks of false bravado. The juxtaposition of this post with the hardness of your OP is rather jarring. Where does the lack of empathy originate?

I'm sorry you had those experiences as a child and that no one stepped up on your behalf. You "survived", others didn't. That doesn't make them any weaker than you or you any stronger than them, though.

[Malikshah]

25. Have the bullies found new and insidious ways to belittle and bully people 24/7. Has the

internet added to this so virtual mobs can attack constantly giving the person no respite.
No--we're not a society of wimps.

We're a society to 1) allows this to happen 2) has members who don't appear to have the wherewithal to see the real problem and 3) decide to grab their collective crotch and tell folks to "man up"

[HereSince1628]

50. One of the causes of C-PTSD is the inability to escape

from the hostile environment. Suicide is often seen as a response to a hostile environment that is chosen when all other avenues of escape fail.

And the OP doesn't get that _at all_.

It is possible that the internet is but another realm in which a person could be stalked, harrassed, belittled, etc. Of course on any internet board run by competent administrators the rules are made to prevent those behaviors. DU has such rules.

But the rules don't prevent free-speech, whether it is just ill-informed, or intentionally misanthropic.

[kitfalbo]

27. Wimps and sissies

Why are all theses old people who used to go without bicycle helmets, skateboard pads, or seat belt use and such wimps and sissies because they commit suicide at a rate much greater than teens?

God damn wimpy old people!

[EOTE]

79. They just can't take living in modern society.

Fax machines and computers scare them, so they take the easy way out. My generation embraces technology. I guess those sissies 50 and older just can't adapt to the modern age, so they off themselves.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

28. The Child Mortality Rate is about 1/4 (7.6) of what it was in 1960 (30).

http://datafinder.worldbank.org/under-5-mortality-rate

Please keep that in mind before you get all nostalgic for the past.

[MercutioATC]

58. I believe that medical advances have something to do with that.

That statistic really has nothing to do with suicides due to bullying.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

71. In your OP you talk about how tough and awesome the older generation was for

a.)having fewer vaccines
b.) playing with mercury
c.) having no helmets

etc.


That absolutely DOES have something to do with child mortality. You say that those things are symbols of how tough you were back then. But the fact is doing those things also killed off a bunch from you generation.

[MercutioATC]

88. I fear that I inadvertantly misled you.

I'm not claiming that we were "tough". I'm positing that teenage kids offing themselves when they're teased at school MAY be indicative of a decline in our proposal for continued survival.


Cushy has benefits...but every benefit has its drawbacks.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

91. The problem is that you assume those things made you tough.

There is no proof of that. Only that they made a significant number of you dead.

[ieoeja]

142. I love those "we did all this stuff and survived" emails.

I always point out that the child mortality rate is much smaller today, so obviously a lot did *not* survive it. For some reason those kids never forward stupid emails about it.

[MercutioATC]

247. No, it assumes that ordinary people lived through these things with great frequency in the past.

...and that, perhaps, our need to wrap everything in figurative bubble wrap is unfounded (and harmful).

[LanternWaste]

182. Post hoc ergo prompter hoc... n/t

Post hoc ergo prompter hoc...

[Deep13]

29. Yes, but that has nothing to do with bullying.

We're wimps become we are accustomed to think modern creature comforts are necessary.

How do you know victims of bullying didn't kill themselves in the '70s? Most of them don't now. You are taking a few highly reported examples and extrapolating to the whole population. I find it disconcerting that you are insisting that the victims here stop being wimps without anything critical to say about the little criminals who are causing the problems. It's kind of a wimp thing to do to blame the victim and refuse to acknowledge the root of the problem.

I don't think your factual claims are accurate.

"My generation (I'm 42) made do without bicycle helmets, skateboard pads, or seat belt use (and what protected you if a car crashed was a lot of metal...no modern engineering, antilock brakes, or airbags)."

First, modern cars are far safer than than those old dinosaurs from the 60s and 70s. People were less safety-conscious then and a lot of people died and suffered as a result.

"We had to be home when the streetlights came on, but our parents didn't know where we were all day...and we didn't have cell phones to check in with."

Agree with you there. Except for the streetlights. The world does not suddenly become dangerous because the sun is down.

"We broke thermometers so we could play with the mercury (hell, our science teachers let us play with mercury in class)."

Bullshit. There is only a tiny amount of mercury in a thermometer.

"We sat in restaurants and movie theaters...and at dining room tables...with smokers. Heavy smokers."

And it sucked ass. Everything smelled like an ashtray back them. It was obnoxious and hazarous.

"We'd play in the dirt and visit any number of public places without the benefit of hand sanitizer."

True. Growing up too clean is apparently bad for ones development.

"We were vaccinated for about half the stuff kids these days are vaccinated for."

False. More children were vaccinated for more things back then. If you are 42 then you have a spot of depressed skin on your shoulder from a smallpox vaccine. That vaccine is no longer in use. A lot of parents for purely stupid reasons refuse to vaccinate children. The reason most of us are here today is because our parents did not die as children. Before modern sanitation and vaccination, about half of all children could be expected to die as children.

"...and many of us were bullied. We either learned to avoid the bullies, made friends with bigger kids, or ran fast. We also learned (the hard way) that 'if you stand up to a bully, he'll back down' is generally bullshit."

And many of us still carry the mental scars from that. Again you are wrong for blaming the victims and not the aggressors. Many of those bullies are now my 'customers' in this D.A.'s office.

"The generation before us endured all of this and more."

Endured is the right word. These things were hinderances.

"The generation before them had all of that, plus a depression. They got jobs when they were 10 to help feed their families."

And remained ignorant their whole lives as a result. Psst, child labor is a bad thing.

[Berry Cool]

136. Yeah. It seems to me that most people who brag about what they survived in the "good old days"

when they were kids and there were no mandatory protections, laws, etc., about this and that and the other thing are either Republican idiots or libertarian nuts. Their point is to either imply that if you're really tough and macho and not wimpy, you don't need your parents or the government protecting you from ANYTHING, because, you know, that interferes with free enterprise and personal freedom and stuff.

I think they see the past the way they want to see it and ignore the bad side, and the bad things that did happen.

Yeah, there's such a thing as helicopter parents and overprotection and kids not having as much freedom and fun as they used to, but to argue that you just haven't had a happy childhood unless you've been allowed to play with the mercury in a broken thermometer...I just think that's kinda dumb.

I look back at some of the stuff I did and am quite frankly thankful I am not dead. I don't look back and say "Wow, what a shame that no four-year-old kid today will get to ride all the way from Ohio to Florida sitting on the fold-down arm hump in the middle of the front seat of their dad's convertible with no seat belt or child safety seat...that was an irreplaceable experience in my life and it's sad that no kid will ever again be able to experience that." No, it's more like: OH MY GOD!!!!! Between that and almost drowning in a pool, I'm lucky to even be here to remember!!

And I certainly don't scoff at today's kids for not being "tough" enough to put up with bullying. Bullying should have zero tolerance. Nobody should be bullied. I was bullied and I'm happy that schools are taking a tougher stance on it, finally. It's about damn time. Implying that kids who kill themselves over bullying are wimps just doubles the hurt and shows how little compassion one has learned as an adult.

[Douglas Carpenter]

31. maybe society is becoming wimpish, but it is very cold blooded to attribute suicide to it

Suicide is a very sad and desperate move - especially for a child or a teenager. Whatever the causes, being a wimp is not one of them. Bullying can certainly be a contributing factor.

[Subdivisions]

32. Teen suicide due to bullying happened right here in my town in October...

Bullied Cleburne teen commits suicide

Channel 4 has a truly sad story up about a North Texas boy who killed himself recently after classmates teased him about facial scars and a hearing problem.

Hunter Layland (right) was 15 and a freshman at Cleburne High School, where he played on the football team. The scars were the result of a car accident when he was a toddler.

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among young people. And bullying significantly increases the likelihood that a child will think about committing suicide, federal researchers say.

Are schools doing enough to deal with bullies? Are parents? Send me an e-mail if you have a tip. Or join the conversation by commenting below.

http://watchdogblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/11/hot-links-bullied-n-texas-teen.html

---------------------------------------

More with video: http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/Family_Bullied_Teen_Commits_S

[RebelOne]

103. It happened in my town and to the son of a friend of mine.

He was only 15 years old and very overweight. Because of his weight, his schoolmates bullied him unmercifully. One day, he took his father's gun to school. He stood up in class, held the gun up to his head and said, "I'm not going to take it anymore." Then he killed himself. That was over 15 years ago, but since that time his parents have campaigned endless against school bullying. They have even appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show among other talk shows.

[MrsBrady]

33. Correlation does not imply causation

My husband rode motorcycles (still does), smoked, drove a hot car, listed to "rock" music...not exactly the model of a wimp.

but he was terribly bullied and beat up in school...FOR YEARS...even though he fought back.

He once beat up one of the bullies and the others, and even that one bully and the others continued to harass him.

I think he does suffer some kind of after effects, because injustice just infuriates him, especially when he can't stop it.
He did have to deal with suicidal issues at one point...
and had another friend that DID kill himself that was bullied at home, not at school.

He's not a wimp.


edited, left out sentence

[AndrewP]

156. Well said

I generally did the "go along to get along" thing and managed to calm down most bullliest I faced in school with my ability to avoid confrontation.

But at times I still ended up getting bullied. I never fought back and never went running to anyone. Should have, but didn't.

Did I kill myself? No. Did it probably leave a psychological scar? Yes, it did. I can't stand injustice and frankly I think that's one of the reason's I'm as passive aggressive as I am to this day.

So i really have a hard time believing, "Oh people are just sissies today". I can't believe I'm the only one that didn't kill myself but deals with some of the ramifications of the past bullying even to this day.

Thus is life.

[trotsky]

34. Of course, all the kids who died from everything you mention...

aren't exactly around to give us the other side of the story.

Wasn't but a few generations ago when parents tried to have as many kids as they could, so that they could be assured that at least a couple of them would survive to adulthood.

And I think bullying is a lot more intense than it used to be. Far easier for kids to feel isolated.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

36. That's wimp talk. You must not have eaten enough mercury as a child.

[trotsky]

51. My mom gave me the recommended FDA serving.

One glass per day, goddammit!

[SemiCharmedQuark]

67. There is an indirect correlation between wimpiness and use of shoe Xray machines.

I think we know what must be done.

[bullwinkle428]

37. Car crash death rates have gone down DRAMATICALLY over

the past 40 years or so, as a direct result of all of the safety advances made in the subsequent years!

[Subdivisions]

63. '59 Bel Air vs. '09 Malibu...

1 min 42 sec video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

[SemiCharmedQuark]

68. Good. I was hoping someone would post that video.

I couldn't remember what the title was.

[fishwax]

158. wow

I hadn't seen that video before. Thanks for posting it.

[trotsky]

230. That video is incredible.

Just looking at how the cabin crumples in the '59 compared to the '09 - my goodness.

[Katya Mullethov]

266. Look at that red cloud of rust !

Sure LOOKED cherry didnt it ?

[annabanana]

39. Rather, I fear that we have become a society of bullies . . .

Our communities are shattered. Most of us live in the cocoons we have made of our homes, venturing out only to associate with those who most closely agree with us.

There is little "neighborhood gossip over the back yard fence" that used to be able to summon social approbation to curb anti-social tendencies among the kids.

The attitude that "If I bully you it's because you allow me to bully you, therefor you deserve it", is as pervasive as it is ugly.

[laughingliberal]

49. Have to agree with that

We live in a culture now where the ends justify the means. The rich and powerful roll over everyone in their way and get away with it-actually, are admired for it. Does that not have an effect on people in general? Our political discourse consists of ridicule and over the top rhetoric. Even here I see it. Shaming, ridiculing, insults. Yes, there was always bullying but it was not rewarded as it is now.

We just came out of 8 years of an administration that played out bullying on the world stage to the cheers of many of the people in our country. Likely, a man who was a bully as a child. We know he tortured animals as a child. He was a first class bully and half this country voted for him twice.

[Rockholm]

61. I agree.

What the OP was stating is that there used to be a "simpler time". That time has long past, with everything changing as he/she pointed out.
You have aptly pointed out that we have become a nation of bullies, from Joe "you lie" Wilson bullies the President to bullying in the grocery check out line. What has happened that bullying has become the acceptable norm.
I was bullied in school because I was perceived to be gay (heck, I was, but at 6, who can put a name on it). Well, the upperclassmen in my school put a name to it and it stuck, until college, when I gained my voice. The bullying stopped.

[Douglas Carpenter]

74. +1000

[krabigirl]

180. Yep. We are definitely a nation of bullies. We are so right-wing.

[laughingliberal]

40. Of course there were always bullies

And it was always hell. I'm 54 and my first suicide attempt was at 14. I was, fortunately, found and treated before dead. Perhaps the suicide rate is higher now but it was not unheard of back in the day. It was, likely, covered up more. I see today's culture as harsher and I thought it was pretty harsh back then. Are there fewer families where a parent is home most of the time? Are there more families where both parents are putting in long hours and not as available? I'm just asking. I think our eyes have been opened more to the issues caused by bullying. I also think it is more prevalent.

[asdjrocky]

42. Glad your still around!

Hope life is good for you now. :hi:

[laughingliberal]

55. Thank you. That warmed my heart

Life is pretty bad these past 2 years but I had some good years in between and am resigned to being here for the duration whatever that may be.

[asdjrocky]

64. Good for you.

Thanks for the response, there should be more heart warming going on around here.

[trotsky]

57. I think you are right.

Fewer families with involved/accessible parents, along with the digital age - now everybody in school can get a text message about you in seconds. Attacks can be coordinated. Cyber-bullying via Facebook or MySpace, like that horrible woman who created a fake boy account to set a poor girl up only to crush her and cause her to commit suicide. That shit simply didn't exist way back when.

[Tansy_Gold]

43. This is part of a very ignorant internet screed that's been going around

for at least 10 years. Sometimes it's in a pretty powerpoint format, sometimes just a list of the things "we" used to do, like riding bikes without helmets or drinking out of garden hoses.

Too many people forget that times have changed, and people haven't.

I'm older than the OP -- boomer generation, born in 1948 -- and I knew two children who were killed by falls from bicycles, at least one of whom might have lived if she'd had a helmet. The other was killed by a car when he couldn't stop his bike in time because he was unfamiliar with hand brakes and had tried to stop with pedal brakes that just weren't there. Just a couple years ago, a friend of mine hit a stone and fell off her bike and suffered severe facial injuries that required two surgeries to correct. Without a helmet she probably would have died.

The use of hand sanitizers and so on has come into prevalence lately as a response -- effective or not remains to be seen -- to the antibiotic-resistant superbugs that have developed over the past few decades. It's also, of course, a response to advertising campaigns that want to sell more hand sanitizers.

Kids today are vaccinated against diseases that didn't have vaccines "back in the day." I was in kindergarten in 1953-54 when polio vaccine was making serious progress against a horrible, horrible disease. One family in our neighborhood didn't want their kids to get the Salk shots (Sabin sugar cubes were a few years in the future yet) and they ended up with three of their six children suffering from the disease. They were lucky -- all three survived but with lasting effects. Would anyone here like to go back to the days of diphtheria epidemics, or listen to a child with whooping cough, or wonder if mumps would leave their son sterile or measles leave their daughter blind?

I'm sure the NHTSB -- and the insurance companies -- have data on the lives that have been saved by seat belts and air bags and safer cars. Shall I tell you about the time my 17-year-old son rolled his open Bronco on I-10 west of Phoenix? He was wearing a seat belt and walked away from the wreck with cuts on his shoulder from broken windshield glass. The kid who rolled a Jeep at almost the exact same spot a few weeks earlier didn't survive. Nor did the classmate of my daughter who, two weeks before high school graduation, found her seat belt too uncomfortable and took it off so she could nap on the drive home from a week-end at Rocky Point. The driver swerved in the dark, the door came open, and a 17-year-old girl was thrown from the vehicle and killed instantly. On Mother's Day.

And then there was the boy who committed suicide at my high school. He was kind of a geeky kid, into audio visual techno stuff, which was nothing "techno" by today's standards. He ran the movie projectors and worked on the stage crews for the various play productions. To all intents and purposes he had friends and was well liked. But who knows how much teasing he received or how he dealt with it? And why should it be the victim's fault anyway? All we ever knew was that one night he got in the family car in the garage, started it up, and was dead the next morning.

If you're going to wax nostalgic for some mystical, wonderful, perfect past, take a closer and harder look at the facts. In many ways, the good old days weren't so good after all.




Tansy Gold, who very much likes living in the present except for when she listens to KOOL-FM because the '60s really DID have better music.

[laughingliberal]

72. Very well said. Thank you. nt

[trotsky]

76. Thank you for this post. n/t

[truebrit71]

95. Thank you for this post...waxing nostalgic for the "good old days" is nauseating..

..they weren't that good to begin with..

[Nikki Stone1]

134. Bravo, Tansy.

Well said.

[SteelPenguin]

139. +100

Was going to post something along these lines, but this pretty much nails it.

[Berry Cool]

141. Thank you. One point I want to make, though.

Hand sanitizers are probably partly to blame for the development of so many superbugs. When antibacterial sanitization becomes so commonplace, it helps more and more bugs become more resistant as they become exposed again and again, with the "loser" bugs dying off and the winners making it to the next round and being more resistant than ever.

It's believed that one of the reasons we had the polio epidemic of the 1950s was that by that time, kids' existence was already becoming way more sanitized than it had been in the early 20th century. Kids were swimming in clean pools rather than in the old fishing hole where they got exposed to lots of viruses and stuff but developed resistance to them from the exposure. As a result, when they did get exposed to the polio virus somehow, they went down like tenpins because their bodies hadn't built up natural resistance through exposure.

We may need more and more childhood vaccinations for more and more diseases as time goes on and kids' existences become more antiseptic and we create children who have developed no resistance to anything. Especially the superbugs we're creating with our antiseptics and overuse of antibiotics.

[Pithlet]

189. God yes. Makes me want to gag every time I see it.

It's so stupid. It's easy for people to say "We survived!" Yep. Can't talk to the ones who didn't, can ya, genius. Yeah, no one used to commit suicide in the good old days. Please. I must have been imagining the classmate who tried to hang himself. Or the nerdy kid in a neighboring highschool who actually succeeded in his suicide. And no one died in car accidents or from falling off their bikes in the good old days, either.

[liberal_at_heart]

195. Thank you for that realistic look at the past.

[edhopper]

47. I am older than you

"My generation (I'm 42) made do without bicycle helmets, skateboard pads, or seat belt use (and what protected you if a car crashed was a lot of metal...no modern engineering, antilock brakes, or airbags)."

And I had a friend die because we had no bike helmets. I still ride regularly and would not think of going out without one.

As for your cars with a lot of metal...wrong!

"In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved. Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy.

"It was night and day, the difference in occupant protection," says Institute president Adrian Lund. “What this test shows is that automakers don't build cars like they used to. They build them better."

http://www.iihs.org/50th/default.html

[The Gunslinger]

48. I don't know how many times I've got that chain E-mail

You haven't been to school for a long time...You don't know what it's like there now.

[FreakinDJ]

60. I stood up to Bullys and LEARNED to FIGHT

you bet - they weren't going to lay hands on me without at least getting thier nose bloodied

[ProgressiveProfessor]

150. I have trained a number of stundent for just that reason. The best defense is self defense

[Edweird]

171. I did too.

I had a horrific home life that translated into an inability to 'connect' with people. I never fit in. (hence the screen name) Add to that debilitating dorkiness - I was a dead ringer for Napoleon Dynamite (add the glasses from 'Hyde' on 'that 70's show for bonus hideousness and social awkwardness). That made me an easy target. However, I was also mad-at-the-fucking-world. When I had reached the point where I had all I could stand, it came out. I could no longer contain my rage. I stopped taking shit from bullies. I fought them and won. Standing up for yourself is it's own reward.

[Darth_Kitten]

279. Well, you can't always physically assault your bullies.....

:(

[LanternWaste]

65. I imagine most generations...

I imagine most generations blame the one prior to theirs, and minimize the one after theirs...

[MercutioATC]

70. I kinda thought that I was doing the exact opposite.

I really don't believe in the concept of "blame", so I'm not blaming anybody...just making an observation.

That said, we're becoming softer, not tougher, as a society.

[Deep13]

75. Good. Maybe that will make us less aggressive.

Did it ever occur to you that the reason our parents and grandparents worked so hard and endured so much was so that we would not have to?

[MercutioATC]

81. I wholeheartedly agree with reducing the animalistic agression in our species.

That's different, however, than diminishing our survival instinct.

[Deep13]

121. You seem to be arguing against the survival instinct.

Your post suggests that more hazzards are somehow good for us.

Also, I don't think it is clear at all that aggression is not part of our survival instinct.

[Edweird]

164. Really? You don't see a relationship between the taming of our society

and a distinct lack of effective social and political protest?

[LanternWaste]

112. It seemed to me...

It seemed to me your indictment minimized the next generation; I imagine any generation will validate its existence by doing so.

[LanternWaste]

183. "concept of blame?"

Believing in the "concept of blame?" As in blame is not assigned?

If that interpretation is indeed the case, is the corollary also true-- credit is not assigned? If not, what is the precise and relevant moral difference?

[yellowcanine]

69. Trying to make society better does not make us wimps. Its called progress.

Safety features in cars save lives as well as prevent debilitating injuries.

Protecting kids from harm, including the real harm of bullies, is the responsibility of a civilized society.

And the "good old days" weren't all they were cracked up to be. Kids died of diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, etc. Some likely died from second hand smoke also but we just did not know it.

[MercutioATC]

78. I'm not romanticizing the "good old days". I'm stating facts.

I LIKE driving a car that has AWD and antilock brakes and traction control...and I know that it's safer than any car from the 1970's.

...and I agree with schools taking measures to deal with bullying.


However, I see a problem with supporting a protected society to the degree that kids kill themselves because other kids tease them.

[yellowcanine]

86. Hmm, sounded like romanticizing to me. Also I would dispute your premise that higher awareness of

the harm of bullying has CAUSED kids to kill themselves in response to teasing. I just don't see any evidence that this is the case.

[Tansy_Gold]

98. the way YOU react to something is not the same as how *I* react or

someone else reacts.

Just the other evening, at a party on 12/26, one of my friends started teasing me about being short. I'm barely 5' tall, and though I've never FELT short, I do know I'm not very tall. She teased me and I didn't have a quick comeback and then she laughed some more and said, "Hey, we only tease you 'cause we love you. Don't let it bother you."

The thing is, it DID bother me. She was saying that as a short person I was somehow less important than a person 3 inches taller than I. I could be ignored because I was short. I could be passed over for job promotions -- as happened in the past -- or expected to perform differently in school -- as happened in the past -- or take various other kinds of "abuse" simply because I was not as tall as someone else.

I'm 61 years old. I shouldn't have to be subjected to that kind of treatment, not from a woman (almost) old enough to be my mother. And yet that kind of behavior is tolerated, even laughed at. How I loathed Don Rickles, never found him even slightly amusing. Bullying, of any kind and at any level, is simply intolerable to me. And now I find here on DU that the victims are still blamed because they're "wimpy"? And the approved response is more violence, which just amounts to more bullying from the other side? That is, in my never humble opinion, absurd. It accomplishes nothing.

We are a nation of vicarious bullies. We thrill to war and bombing on peoples who have no means to defend themselves, let alone fight back. We call their tactics "terror" and "cowardly" when they strap bombs to themselves and die for what they believe in, yet we do our killing from a safe distance where all too few of "us" are put in any real danger. And no, I'm not dismissing the very real risks, the very real injuries, the very real deaths suffered by "our" people and their families. But as a nation, we are not really at much risk from the suicide bombers who almost make it to our shores. We are bullies ourselves. With our drones and our bombs we bully the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen and Iraq, among others.

But to defend the violent retaliation of the bullied is to defend the very same suicide bombers who "threaten" us. They, too, have seen their own death as the only way out of a situation they find intolerable.




Tansy Gold

[JNelson6563]

226. Girl, you are a giant IMO.

I always enjoy your insights on the Stock thread and around DU. You rock and I wish you lived in northern MI so we could hang out.

You so rock.

Julie--longtime Tansy Gold fan

[Tansy_Gold]

233. You have just made my day.

A thousand hugs to you, girlfriend. Thank you so very much.

Hope you're stayin' warm up there in the far north. I'm a Chicago-area native, so I know what real winter is like. I'd better not complain that it was overcast and gloomy and a chilly 61 degrees here in central AZ today! :evilgrin:


Stay warm and stay safe, and all the best to you in '10.



Tansy Gold, blushin' like hell :blush:

[devilgrrl]

283. Why do assume that suicides as result of bullying is a recent phenomenon?

Just because there wasn't a 24 hour news cycle discussing the topic in the 1950's, 60's and 70's doesn't mean it that didn't happen then!

You're awfully myopic for a 42 year old.

[baldguy]

73. Just because some of our forbearers survived doesn't mean we need to endure their ignorance.

We treat mercury as a poison because it is. We've banned smoking in public places because it kills people. We now know that the microorganisms that live in dirt will make people sick.

And bullying can cause physical & emotional scars on both the bully and his victims - and should be avoided.

[kctim]

77. I wouldn't say "wimps"

but rather that they have been conditioned to be soft and to feel entitled to special treatment and material things.
They are conditioned to flee instead of confront, making them feel defenseless and vulnerable. They are constantly told they are somehow special and thereby deserving of everything and when they do not get what they want, it is always somebody elses fault. It is always they who have been wronged because nobody understands them. It is always about them.
There are taught how to live in a false utopia but have not been taught how to live and face reality.

[donco6]

80. I grew up gay in a small town. I agree and disagree.

I'm 49. I was bullied in elementary (parochial) school, but managed to make it through somehow. In high school I wasn't bullied much except by one upperclassman who graduated after a year so it didn't matter. (He died in a horrific car crash a few years later and . . . well, I didn't shed any tears).

The impact of the bullying in elementary school was pretty significant. It got me started on a downward spiral of depression that I struggled with up to my 30s. I made a half-hearted suicide attempt as a junior in high school, which my folks promptly decided was due to drug abuse (ha! I didn't even smoke pot in hs, though many of my acquaintances did . . . I didn't really have "friends" as such). So my cry for help went unanswered.

So, I guess I agree and disagree with your post. On the one hand, no one can be there every second to ward off the bullies - it just isn't possible. Blaming the school and the teachers is pointless. I think mine would have tried to help if they'd known, but kids are sly and it would have been worse for me to have tattled. Much worse. In a small town there's no way you're going to pull that off without someone finding out. Plus as a kid, I believed that I probably deserved the treatment I received. You don't know any better without someone telling you that, and I didn't have anyone like that. So you just learn to fight back as best you can and suffer through it when you can't.

On the other hand, we need better access to mental health support in schools. If I'd been able to see that I *didn't* deserve that kind of treatment, I may have stood up for myself sooner and not have started on such a negative spiral. Teachers just can't be expected to provide that. But funds for mental health support in schools are terrible - Medicaid has been cut to nothing anymore, compared to what it was just a few years ago. And schools have their primary function to consider first.

Today, I'm fine. No depression for many many years. Shedding myself of a shitty self-image took quite a while though. I don't know what would have happened if I'd been able to shake it sooner.

Those are my thoughts, from someone who's lived through it.

[TexasObserver]

83. Bullying is much more common, a much wider a problem, and more severe today.

Part of the reason is the limits we impose on dealing with bullying children. The bully was the isolated person thirty years ago. Now, groups of otherwise normal teens engage in horrific bullying.

Bullying is a bigger problem now, and schools can't deal with bullies as firmly as they did in the past, partially because the misbehaving students have parents who are useless, if not sorry.

[Unvanguard]

84. My main regret about this thread is that I can only unrecommend it once. n/t

[truebrit71]

92. +10000

..

[GreenArrow]

87. maybe, but more likely, we've increasingly become a society

of narcissistic, cruel, and callous bastards.

[Forkboy]

89. alrighty then

[truebrit71]

90. I'm 46 and one of my schoolmates back in the day killed himself..was he a wimp too?

Or maybe you could just fuck off with this libertarian bullshit...

[Beetwasher]

93. Sounds Like You're Against Progress

So if we try to improve society it makes us wimps? Or is this some not-so-cleverly disguised "nanny" gov't argument that conservatives are so fond of?

[EnviroBat]

97. I'm exactly your age. I grew up in bad parts of Cleveland.

We changed schools a couple of times. Whenever I was faced with a bully, I stood up, eventually fought with them, and most of them became my friends after the incident. I have a 16 yo old now, and from what I've observed, kids are far more vicious these days than when we were kids. I don't know if it's a sense of invincibility granted to them like an entitlement because parents DO NOT PARENT anymore. Television does. Violence is glamorized, and just about every one of these damn kids walks around like they're bullet-proof. They run their mouths to adults and other kids alike. They respect nothing or no one. They gang up on each other now more than they did, "in my day". back when I was 16, if someone had a problem with you, it was usually one-on-one, otherwise you looked like a group of pansies if it was many against one. Not true anymore. Mob rule, conformity, and exposing the week are the codes of conduct these days. When I was 16, you didn't act like a complete asshole whilst in public for fear of one or both of my parents hearing about it. If I did, I got my ass beat as I deserved.

I think the "wimps" you are referring to are the parents.

[dsc]

100. I am exactly your age

and but for the grace of God, I would have been a suicide due, at least in part, to bullying. It wasn't all bullying because it was a big part not being able to live with being gay, but the bullying was a large part of it. I think if I didn't hear what an evil faggot I was nearly 24/7 I might not have felt so shitty about being gay. I was lucky enough to be able to escape and be able to reinvent myself. In the digital age, I'm not sure I could have. I don't know if I could have lived with my most terrible humiliations on youtube for all the world to see, knowing that I could go to college in Timbuktu and still have people know that I got humiliated as a high school freshman. The slights seemed permanent then but at least I knew if I got far enough away I could overcome them. They weren't broadcast for all the world and eternity to see.

[Xenotime]

102. Survival of the fittest...maybe?

:shrug: :shrug: :shrug: :shrug: :shrug:

[BakedAtAMileHigh]

104. Desensitization: Are We Becoming A Nation of A**holes?

Apparently. Thanks for the reminder, numbnuts.

[Bluebear]

133. :nodding:

[Bluerthanblue]

159. that's a much better question-

imo- and one which asks us to look inward, rather than blaming victims.

:thumbsup:

[krabigirl]

181. yes :)

[devilgrrl]

284. you can say that again!

:thumbsup:

[Hatchling]

105. I remember it being a game: "First to see the streetlights on!"

"We had to be home when the streetlights came on, but our parents didn't know where we were all day...and we didn't have cell phones to check in with."

Unfortunately in our neighborhood a half dozen or more of us kids got raped when a predator moved in on us.

After that all the parents damn well made sure they knew where we all were. There was no more playing in the woodlots or walking down exciting alleys on our way home from school to steal mulberries from backyards and playing pretend. We were made to buddy up and come straight home and playing was done in yards with an adult watching us.

Luckily, my parents and I kept really quiet about it happening to me. Most of the other kids did too, but we kinda knew who each other were.

The girl whose kid sister outed her got treated as a slut by every boy in junior high and shunned by every girl. When we all went to high school she wasn't there. I think her family moved.

The boy who got outed was teased unmercifully as a "homo" and killed himself. Probably thinking the guy wouldn't have raped him if he weren't a "homo".

And family and friends molestation went on and on. Not talked about, sometimes not even acknowledged.

So no, we are not becoming a society of wimps. We are becoming a society that is finally facing the rot in our society and trying to do something about it. Ironically it took a few suicides by school shootings to point this rot out to us.

edited to add: I am now 58 I did attempt suicide then as well. I was truly surprised to wake up the next morning after taking two of my mom's sleeping pills and 6 aspirin. Later in life I tried it a few more with more pills but was fortunate that I was found in time. My PTSD has incapacitated me and I live on a regime of psych meds to have a semblance of normal life.

[LeftishBrit]

107. I have rarely seen the fundamental philosophy of the right-wing expressed in as few words

The vulnerable are just wimps! It was much better when we didn't coddle them. Then people (well, those who survived) were tougher! It is a *good thing* to refuse to prevent illness and poverty and violence, because if the weak are not crushed enough, and the strong are not trained enough in harshness toward the weak, then we become a society of wimps. The Devil take the hindmost!

Sounds like the typical philosophy of the extreme right.


'My generation (I'm 42) made do without bicycle helmets, skateboard pads, or seat belt use (and what protected you if a car crashed was a lot of metal...no modern engineering, antilock brakes, or airbags).'

Well except for those who got killed. Despite many more cars around than when we were children, the road death rates have gone down dramatically since then, at least in the UK. Do you think that's a bad thing?

'We had to be home when the streetlights came on, but our parents didn't know where we were all day...and we didn't have cell phones to check in with.'

I think that there IS too much paranoia around nowadays about child abusers behind every corner. And we did get more freedom of movement when we were kids. However, my memories (and I am very slightly older than you) don't fully tally here, as while we were under much less supervision, we WERE supposed to go home directly from school and let our parents know where we we were going before we went out - or we'd be in Big Trouble.

'
'We sat in restaurants and movie theaters...and at dining room tables...with smokers. Heavy smokers.'

And many kids had lots of colds and coughs because of it, not to mention the effects in later life. I don't suppose sitting next to a smoker once in a blue moon did kids much harm, but constant exposure, especially in families where the parents smoked, was/is*not* good for kids' lungs. Do you think that it's good for kids to be set up for bronchitis in adult life? Do you think it's good for kids with asthma or other chest complaints never to be able to go to the cinema or to visit most of their friends? Or I suppose they are just wimps who don't deserve any adaptations!

'We'd play in the dirt and visit any number of public places without the benefit of hand sanitizer.'

I think this is something that HAS gone a bit overboard, especially about dirt - but at the same time, spreading epidemics isn't that wonderful either.

#We were vaccinated for about half the stuff kids these days are vaccinated for.'

Bring Back Infectious Diseases! It will thin the herd, and get rid of those unnecessary weaklings!

...and many of us were bullied. We either learned to avoid the bullies, made friends with bigger kids, or ran fast. We also learned (the hard way) that "if you stand up to a bully, he'll back down" is generally bullshit.'

And many people turned into bullies themselves; truanted from school or left as early as possible; or developed chronic mental health problems. Most didn't kill themselves, but most don't now. Being bullied once or twice may not harm children much, but being bullied constantly over many years does. As does being given a free rein to bully.

'The generation before them had all of that, plus a depression. They got jobs when they were 10 to help feed their families.'

And that's a good thing? Many people died. Many people were harmed physically for the rest of their lives. Many were crushed spiritually and morally by their desperation - making those in Europe easy targets for recruitment by the likes of Hitler and Mussolini.

Why not go back all the way to the days when British children were sent up chimneys and down coal mines, American slaves laboured in the fields all day and were beaten regularly, and towns everywhere were filled with stenches from the lack of sanitation, resulting in regular epidemics of cholera, typhoid and similar diseases? I suppose that helped to purge the wimps. Let's get back to a time when one child in four could be eliminated by the age of five - then the survivors will be the tough ones! Or maybe that isn't such a good idea.

=

[BakedAtAMileHigh]

111. bingo

+1.

[Silent3]

113. Thank you. n/t

[dugaresa]

116. +1000 for summing up exactly how i feel

[krabigirl]

179. Yep. Typical right-wing blame the victim BS.

[liberal_at_heart]

190. +1

[XanaDUer]

213. Thank you.

nt.

[trotsky]

231. LB, if I am ever in the UK...

beyond the hour or so I spent at Heathrow last September, remind me that I have to buy you a beer!

[Bluenorthwest]

108. I think bullies like to look for rationalizations

I'm older than you. And bullies have always been a problem and they still are. Sociopaths at a young age are often called 'bullies'.

[Echo In Light]

153. +1

[StarfarerBill]

109. Kids committed suicide over being bullied when we were in school, too (I'm 45).

And they died from head injuries caused by not wearing helmets on bikes and motorcycles; and they died from not wearing seatbelts in car crashes; and their lives as adults have been shortened due to inhaling secondhand smoke as kids; and medical science has progressed, so kids are being vaccinated for more things these days.

Lessening these effects isn't bad; why should parents deny their children basic safety measures available today? And why assume things were better when we were kids; I enjoyed my childhood, but I won't deny there are things that I wish I'd had back then...like a computer. ;)

If, on the other hand, you think parents and society in general are being overprotective then blame them, not the kids. Children can be incredibly tough, but pyschologically in particular, they can also be very fragile; protecting them from what harm we can is no vice.

[undeterred]

115. Its possible that you simply lack the empathy to understand

why teenagers commit suicide.

[Dappleganger]

118. Don't forget all the comedians who were born out of bullying!

We taught our kids to fight with words...unfortunately they've become very good at it but at least I know that none of them will ever take crap from anyone, LOL.

[Wind Dancer]

119. Interesting question...

I saw this years ago posted on a right wing message board. This is a slam on government regulations, pure and simple.

No helmets...... kids working at the age of ten..... ignoring the danger of second hand smoke?

[Marr]

120. Wait a minute. Who exactly put all these wimpy safety measures in place?

That was *your* generation, pal. Hardly the tough crowd, I'm sorry.

For the record, I'm about the same age as you. I don't understand parents' desire to make the world child-proof... from anti-bacterial everything to padded playgrounds. But-- if we have a wimp problem, it rests with the present parent generation, not the kids. They just got here.

[DavidDvorkin]

126. I'm 66. Uphill, both ways, against the wind, fighting off packs of wolves!

You're just a kid. Why, in my day ...

Etc. This is the same garbage I used to hear from older people when I was kid, a huge number of decades ago. Eventually, I started hearing it from my own generation. Now I'm hearing it from the next one.

[wryter2000]

148. I'm 61

We ate worms, and we were glad to get them! When we didn't have snow to make snowballs, we used rocks. Kapow! And if the guy who got hit cried, we threw him in the river. If we had a river. Most of us only had gutter. You were lucky if you lived in the country and had a trough where the horses drank. But then, you had to pull the plow over the back 40 before you went to school. If you had a school, and not just a little slate. And no damned chalk.

Kids today...

[DavidDvorkin]

194. You had worms?

Damn. We could only dream of worms.

[wryter2000]

201. We got the hand-me-down worms

From the rich kids down the street. :)

[DavidDvorkin]

215. :)

[nuxvomica]

128. There was a high-profile case in my grade school...

Probably 3-4 years before you were born. An 8th-grade kid tried to drown himself in the river behind the school but was stopped by his best friend, after a search was started in the woods near the river. Because of the high-profile search and the kid's survival, we learned why he was trying to do it. It was because of the bullying he was suffering from the other kids. Had this occurred quietly and if the kid had been "successful" it would probably have been reported as an accidental drowning.
So I suspect that it wasn't all that uncommon when I was a kid, just less publicized.

[TuxedoKat]

130. The nature of the bullying has changed

You said you were beaten up 3-4 times a week on the playground. That was where it happened for you mostly (I'm guessing, excuse me if I'm wrong) and you probably knew all or most of your bullies. Same with me in 6th & 7th grades (I'm a little older than you), the bullies were the kids in my classes and when I left school I could avoid them as the bullying happened there. With my daughter's generation it's different -- with the internet and cellphones the bullying can be 24/7 and a good chunk of it is anonymous as the bullies hide their identities in anonymous texts, etc. To a 12-13 year old, it feels like there is no escape from it and no way to protect yourself as you don't even know WHO SOME OF THE BULLIES ARE. Think about how scary that can be for a moment -- there are kids walking around your school who seemingly hate you and persecute you and you don't even know who they are -- send you anonymous texts or IMs, call you horrible names when you aren't looking in the hallways for everyone else to hear, throw things at you when your back is turned, etc. At least when I got home from school I knew that I was away from the bullies/bullying for awhile.

My daughter suffered physical, racial and sexual harrassment at her school this past year. It was horrendous. We moved her to a private school this fall because her school did not do much to help although since then I've learned that because of Title 9 (thank you, Sen. Kennedy) they are required by law to investigate at least sexual harrassment; I don't know if they are required to investigate other forms of bullying. The bullying I experienced was horrendous but it was NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING compared to what my daughter experienced. Having experienced bullying myself and knowing how damaging it was and I knew I had to get her out of that situation to protect her from the bullies and perhaps to prevent her from hurting herself as well.

Edited to add:

Lest you think she is a wimpy kid, she is not. She was not averse to standing up to her bullies, on the contrary she would seek them out and confront them, when she knew who they were. It wears you down though when so many are anonymous and you don't know who to confront.

[Darth_Kitten]

278. I'm so sorry your daughter was tormented so.

She is definitely not a wimp.

My guess is those cowards were very jealous of your daughter.

[TuxedoKat]

299. Thank you...

Yes I think that is true. My niece, also an incredibly strong, self-confident girl who was also bullied advised me that some people feel threatened by strength and they try to tear you down because of it. In my daughter's case too, she is a beautiful, talented, accomplished girl of color and in our 90-95% caucasian town, kids around here don't experience girls like her very often, so yes, they probably are fearful and jealous of her.

[TuxedoKat]

300. Thank you...

Yes I think that is true. My niece, also an incredibly strong, self-confident girl who was also bullied advised me that some people feel threatened by strength and they try to tear you down because of it. In my daughter's case too, she is a beautiful, talented, accomplished girl of color and in our 90-95% caucasian town, kids around here don't experience girls like her very often, so yes, they probably are fearful and jealous of her.

[seabeyond]

138. maybe the kids in the past had more security and stronger foundation and able to endure

these normal events of childhood better than today. maybe the adults in our lives where actually a part of our lives giving us the things we need to be able to endure, grow, be stronger.

maybe it is a reflection on us adults and not so much the kids

[NYC_SKP]

143. We also flew on airlines, just got to the gate 5 or 10 minutes early, not TSA bullshit. nt

[SteelPenguin]

146. Suicide Rates have decreased ->1950: 13.2 - 2000: 10.4

According to the CDC the rates of suicide have decreased in the past 50 years.

(per 100,000 pop)

1950 13.2
1960 13.2
1970 13.2
1980 12.5
1990 11.8
2000 10.4

How does that affect your argument?

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. From Health, United States, 2005.

[fishwax]

151. teen suicide rates are lower now than they were in the 1980s

[Orsino]

152. There are a lot more kids nowadays...

...and not so many more parents to guide them. Teachers, too, are overburdened and unable to give as much individual attention. The television tells them that violence solves any issue, and that suicide is gloriously tragic.

We are a nation that is suffocating.

[Bluerthanblue]

157. no- not in my opinion. The excessive protectiveness you cite doesn't

really have much to do with kids who kill themselves after being bullied.

It has to do with how 'we' view ourselves. More than ever before how you look, who you know, and what you possess defines many kids sense of self-worth. It's not a question of 'danger'- (mercury, sh smoke, car seats/seatbelts etc). It's a question of your place in the world, your value as a human being. Our society has made living outside some pretty sharp boundries very difficult. How the world sees you is who you are, to far too many of us. And this world has become very judgemental and cruel.

just my opinion- which is often not shared.

:hi:

[HuckleB]

161. Exactly.

However, the protectiveness may have something to do with the difficulty some people have adjusting to adulthood today.

[HuckleB]

160. We may be on the way to becoming wimps.

But that has nothing to do with a kid killing himself, and the bullying was likely only one part of the equation.

[WI_DEM]

162. this isn't new, you know? people have killed themselves due to bullying for a long time

especially kids.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

163. I agree about the parental paranoia BUT

my impression is that the bullies are meaner than they were in our day, waaaay meaner, so mean that they scare other kids away from standing up for the victim or even associating with the victim.

I was emotionally bullied by the "Heathers" in junior and senior high school, and the effects lasted for years. If people were nice to me, I was sure that it was because they were going to turn on me later. But I never received death threats, never was accosted and beaten up in the stairwell, never received mass hate e-mail, never had serious sexual harassment or threats of rape, or any of the other things that you hear about now.

[chrisa]

165. Nobody kills themselves because they're "wimps."

They kill themselves because they're mentally ill; illness caused by years and years of teasing and conditioning, leading them to believe that they're a useless human being, and it would be better if they were gone.

If everybody calls you "retard" or other insults for years and years, and the adults and teachers just look on and think its "funny," "cute," and "boys being boys (or girls being girls)," why would you not believe it?

Then, everybody looks on and just says, "Wow, why did he do it? So young..." The same cowards that could have stopped it in the first place, and looked away, uncaring of what is going on, suddenly act surprised.

Think about what low self-esteem you would need to kill yourself in the first place. It's destroying yourself, because you don't think you're worthy of life. It's just not rational.

[Kalyke]

169. Jeremy spoke in class today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS91knuzoOA

At home
Drawing pictures
Of mountain tops
With him on top
Lemon yellow sun
Arms raised in a V
Dead lay in pools of maroon below

Daddy didn't give attention
To the fact that Mommy didn't care
King Jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world

Jeremy spoke in class today
Jeremy spoke in class today

Clearly I remember
Pickin' on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck

But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth
And bit the recessed lady's breast
How could i forget
He hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurtin
Dropped wide open

Just like the day
Like the day i heard
Daddy didn't give affection
And the boy was something mommy wouldn't wear
King jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world

Jeremy spoke in class today
Jeremy spoke in class today
Try to forget this...
Try to erase this...
From the blackboard.

[bridgit]

170. "society of wimps"? Naw, but for a good time glass of wine between friends we've always been...

a violent predatory society - it wasn't only bullies although they made their contribution, hm, I suppose it could have been those years of incestural dogma, forced medication & interruption eh you know what fuck it cause the short of it is that I tried three times and nearly succeeded the 3rd after having my own throat slit and left for dead aalllll of which onnnnlllly to be revived back into a world where the very same bully-spawn kills it's own parents just cause they can't play mother fucking HALO!

:cry:

You want to see the real wimps? Study the bullies themselves but this "The undesirability of bullying aside" is one of the funniest things I have ever read :spray:

[ecstatic]

173. No just an unhealthy society--Suicidal thoughts actions are due to a chemical imbalance in the brain

The brain is naturally programmed for survival. When that is not the case, it is usually due to a temporary/ongoing chemical imbalance brought on by a foreign substance or something else. All the bullying/adverse events in the world won't make a healthy/non-impaired person commit suicide.

[bettyellen]

200. but bullies most often pick on the vulnerable so it's not that simple

[JCMach1]

174. No, the level of bullying is disgusting... Much worse than my generation...

[Still Blue in PDX]

175. My experience.

I was bullied at school. There were other reasons besides that, but when I was 13 I took a bunch of pills my mom had stashed and sliced open my wrists. My mom's reaction was to freak out that she couldn't take me to the hospital because someone might find out about it, and she was extremely pissed that I got into the hoard of pills she was saving so SHE could kill herself when she decided to. (She was "bullied," i.e., beat up weekly by my dad, who was a weekend alcoholic).

For the 1960s, we were a pretty average family.

[LWolf]

177. There's a difference.

Our entire culture at this point is absolutely saturated in bullying. It's not just kids on the playground or in the neighborhood.

It's the way our entire society operates, where in order to gain personal, political, religious, or economic status, one must engage in bullying others.

[krabigirl]

178. Nope...I agree with everything else you mentioned, but NOT about the bullying.

Your question should have been, are becoming a nation of assholes? The answer is YES.

[liberal_at_heart]

185. My dad was from that generation and he was miserable

His mother couldn't afford to take care of him so he had to go live with an abusive aunt and uncle. He worked on the farm since he was a small child. He was bullied. He worked construction all of his life. He never wore sunscreen and now has had skin cancer because of it. He has suffered from low-self esttem, depression, and anxiety all his life. He was so tough he never showed his feelings towards me and we have never been close. Yes I can see how we would all want to strive for that kind of life. I love my dad, but I know he would not want me or my kids to have to be as tough as he had to be. By the way I don't think whether someone is suicidal or not has anything to do with toughness. It is a mental illness and needs to be dealt with through counseling and medication not telling them to toughen up and get over it.

[Gwendolyn]

186. Yes, we are becoming physically wimpier and fatter. That's a fact.

Perhaps we'll eventually evolve into heads on a stick. That is, is if a massive global event doesn't shut us down first. But even then, the human body is resilient and capable of shaping up quickly.

We aren't wimpier re suicide however. At least that's what the stats show. There is more media attention replacing the secret family shame of it, but stats don't indicate an increase in suicide. Perhaps more kids are offing themselves over being outed on the net, but in the past they threw themselves into the river because they were pregnant, or labeled "tarded." It's all a wash, really.

[Blue_In_AK]

187. My husband and I were just talking about the mercury

the other day. I used to LOVE playing with that stuff. It was so cool the way it blobbed up.

When we used to travel to see my grandparents when I was a kid, we would level out the floorboard in the back seat with pillows and blankets. I'd sleep on the floor, and my brother would sleep on the seat because my dad would drive straight through from Colorado to Ohio. I'm guessing he would get in big trouble for that these days.

I see the need for safety, and bicycle helmets probably aren't a bad idea (I got a concussion from a bicycle crash when I was 11), but all in all, I think we've maybe gone a little overboard with the safety stuff.

I do have a problem with bullying, though.

[ddeclue]

188. yes

[nyc 4 Biden]

191. Sounds like a beer commercial. n/t

[liberal_at_heart]

196. I so long for the days when my autistic child would have been called a retard. NOT!

In the past my child would have been beaten up and called a retard. I would have been blamed for his disability and he would be living in an insitution instead of going to public school. Do I want that for my child so he can learn the lesson of being tough? No, I would rather live in what you call a whimpy world thank you.

[Pithlet]

199. Boy do I hear you. If that means we're getting soft, I'll take it.

Here's to present and the future! I tend to be a very nostalgic person, but I absolutely hate certain aspects of nostalgia. The tendency to lament about how awful things are now compared to the good old days. Lots of things weren't so good. Progress is a good thing.

[debbierlus]

197. People kill themselves because they don't have the emotional resources to deal with their circumstan

I think it degrading to people who suffer on a such a emotionally profound level to cast them in such disparaging terms.

The lack of emotional insight and empathy in your post is astounding.

Talk about bullying. (Kids are WIMPS for killing themselves?)

(And, suicides and mental illness are not new to this generation. The subject was tabboo and those who suffered were locked away and the suicides were not covered on the nightly news. You are casting a image that isn't reality).

This is a cruel world. And, some individuals due to their genetic code can't cope with the insanity and meanness as well as others. People of a more sensitive biological constitution can be eaten alive.

It is a shame that these people are viewed as weak. Due to their sensitivity and emotional vulnerability, they could teach a lot about empathy and sharing, if they were valued instead of regarded as weak.

This is such a sad post.

[gmoney]

198. "...and we liked it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N2E93VzQSA

[Arugula Latte]

202. I hate that bullshit cliche -- "We didn't have bike helmets, blah blah blah."

Yeah, well, you were one of the kids, like me, who was LUCKY and didn't get a brain injury or die (I'm 43 and rode bikes and half-tamed horses without helmets, and I had plenty of spills, but I was LUCKY). Thousands of others who were born when we were can't speak for themselves, because they are dead or paralyzed. My son's best friend was hit by an SUV that swerved into the bike lane. His helmet was destroyed, but his skull was intact. If that had happened 30 years ago he would have been killed or severely injured.

[XanaDUer]

210. Me, too

I am 44 and way lucky I was not seriously injured from bikes, skateboards, horses, etc.

[GreenPartyVoter]

203. I was bullied horribly all through school, physically and verbally. And it didn't help

that I am bipolar.

So yeah, I can understand why some kids are turning to suicide over it, and no it's not because they are wimps. They probably just can't take it anymore and lose all hope of getting away from it. :(

[Zoeisright]

205. That's just pathetic.

I cannot stand that attitude of 'it happened to me and I didn't react that way; I didn't get sick; I survived.'

So fucking what. A lot of kids have been hurt through just such stupid attitudes.

And whining about more protections for kids is just asinine (look it up). Injuries are the leading cause of death for children, and those deaths have been reduced drastically because of safety regulations.

[saltpoint]

208. A teen suicide owing to bullying by his or her peers at school implicates

not the constitutional sturdiness of that teenager but the ethical character of the community which sanctioned the bullying.

A soldier returning from duty in Iraq, for example, who is in need of treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is not a "wimp" for needing treatment after subjecting herself or himself to a zone of conflict, tension, violent uncertainty, and regional hostilities. Some soldiers suicide. It is a loss of a human being not an assessment of her character in a war zone.

Sitting in movie theaters where people are smoking cigarettes does not have anything to do with ethical constitution or its absence. It is a serious health risk.

Calling somebody a 'wimp' accuses that person of not having the psychic stamina to accept a reasonable amount of rough-and-tumble and realism when in fact teens who kill themselves and soldiers who kill themselves have already been asked to absorb more abuse than any "reasonable" sum.

The undesirability of branding aside, it is certainly possible that we have become a society of psychosocial predators, geared for and dangerously accustomed to unnatural levels of abuse against others.

[RedCappedBandit]

274. Very well said. nt

[XanaDUer]

209. This sounds similar to a stupid conservative e-mail my freeper

coworkers send out from time to time.

Along the lines of, "We used to eat lumps of poison as children, and we survived."

:eyes:

[CBGLuthier]

218. what an asinine statement

Using words like wimp is a big part of the problem.

I think we have the opposite problem. We are a nation of heartless assholes. Thispost does nothing to refute that.

[CreekDog]

219. Okay Brainiac, what's a valid reason to commit suicide?

:wtf:

[MercutioATC]

250. Painful terminal disease, perhaps?

Aside from that, very little.

It's a tired cliche, but suicide IS a permanent solution to a temporary situation.

[Bluerthanblue]

289. having known/knowing the effect of intolerable physical pain,

and that of mental pain/suffering, I'd take the physical anyday.

Life is often a painful terminal disease for many, BECAUSE of emotional suffering.

I'm glad for you, that you do not seem to understand this.

:hi:

[Rob H.]

221. I'm slightly younger than you

and one of my classmates killed himself when we were juniors in high school because he was perceived as gay. He was relentlessly belittled and harassed and probably thought he had nowhere to turn, so suicide was the only option he felt he had. He was called "faggot" and "queer" by people who didn't even know him and he seemed to shrug it off--no one really knew how much pain he was in until they found his suicide note. He was also probably one of the most considerate, thoughtful people I met in high school.

[L0oniX]

222. I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow only to get beat up by a bully...

...who later on after many assault and battery charges eventually ended up on death row for murder.

[JNelson6563]

223. Every once in a while some go bad-ass instead.

Columbine.

[woo me with science]

229. There is a double-edged sword here.

The increased seriousness about bullying is good. However, kids are much more than in the past being given the message that they are victims and will be irrevocably scarred by experiences that, in the past, were considered a part of growing up and something that you grow stronger through dealing with.

Nobody is saying that serious bullying doesn't warrant adult intervention. However, we have had contentious threads here at DU about whether a child observed in a Burger King suffered emotional trauma over invalidation over a french fry. We also see kids discussed repeatedly as though they were hothouse flowers who must not be exposed to any negative emotion, ever - for example, the arguments about ending a baseball game early when the score gets too lopsided and "traumatizing" for the losing team.

I am distressed by repeated threads here that suggest that kids who undergo a genuinely traumatic experience will necessarily be scarred for life or NEED therapy as a result, even before any maladjustment after the fact has been shown to exist...this even though humankind has shown remarkable resilience to terrible things throughout history with the help of family and friends, in the absence of psychologists. We have a sick cultural myth going these days that states that any trauma to the system is and must necessarily be debilitating rather than an opportunity for growth. This is a terrible message to give children, and I believe it is given pervasively today.

I also believe that kids are often given the message that they are somehow strange, weird, or aberrant if they have dark thoughts or fantasies, or if they experience negative feelings...even though such things are NORMAL for a creative, emotional human mind. I cannot count the number of times I have been annoyed to see someone at DU leap to assumptions of abuse at home if a child demonstrates a dark thought or fantasy. We leave kids thinking that they are mentally sick if their minds do not work in the sanitized way we imagine for them, or if their daily lives do not shine and sparkle in the way our popular culture says they should.

We have a sick society in a lot of ways. Kids aren't given the message anymore that they are resilient; rather, they are taught to look for ways in which they are being wronged or emotionally wounded. While it's important that bullying is taken seriously now, we need to be very careful that we also continue to teach resilience rather than a victim role. Treating it all as though it is necessarily a soul-crushing experience - instead of a learning experience - can make for a very sick and narcissistic attitude that can contribute to suicidal thoughts.

[Gwendolyn]

232. This is a very thoughtful and interesting post. Couldn't agree with you more.

I'm not able to dig it out right now, but remember reading about the role old-fashioned fairy tales (the ones with fiery dragons, terrifying monsters and sometimes bad endings) played in teaching children to wrestle successfully with inner demons and find an outlet for their fears. Today we try to protect children from their own imaginations, and this isn't necessarily a great thing. Lol, I know I grew up on tales of Struwwelpeter, the likes of the Pied Piper, and children's poetry that included tragic love lorn medieval stuff and Edgar Allen Poe. My kid will enjoy the same terror and drama I adored as a child. :)

[woo me with science]

241. Are you thinking of

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim? If not, I'd love a title if you can think of it. I agree with you strongly that stories and fantasy are exactly the place where children should be able to work out these things safely, without the wagging fingers/hysteria of adults to stifle them. I LOVED Strewwelpeter...Thanks for reminding me to pull it out again.

I often enjoy and agree strongly with your posts. Thanks for chiming in here...

[Gwendolyn]

251. YES! That was it, thank-you...

I enjoyed that book years ago, and already plucked it out of the bookshelf to look at again. (Not totally relevant here and from a slightly different perspective -- From the Beast to the Blonde, by Marina Warner was an interesting read as well I thought.)

I enjoy your posts too Woo. They always inspire thought. :)

[Pithlet]

235. I think it's two separate issues.

I think you can teach children to be resiliant. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think you can also teach them not to be bullies and that bullying can't be tolerated. The move in that direction is a good thing. Bullying can indeed be emotionally scarring. I don't think kids need it. There's plenty of conflict and drama in childhood without it. My parents were fairly tradional in their style. Definitely no teaching anyone to be a victim going on in my household. And I could have done without the bullying. I was a nerdy kid with thick glasses, so I got a lot of it. I've come a long way, but I think I still deal with the consequences. So yes, I think the kids today are soft argument is BS.

I saw the french fry thread. I think it's a stretch to say that's a symptom of anything in society. This is DU. You can't use it as a barometer of the health of society. We run the gamut, here. Just when I think to myself "I've seen it all, nothing can shock me here", I'm proved wrong.

[NMMNG]

234. Tell that to the mother of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover

You can't tell it to Carl anymore, because he's dead.

[noamnety]

238. If you can repeat your post in a new thread, I guess I can repeat my reply.

I have issues with your post, and equating consumer protections with "ninnies."

Yes, in the old days we didn't have all these vaccines. And the result wasn't that we were "tougher." It was that most of us knew people who had polio, scarlet fever, etc.

Yes, in the old days it was assumed we should put up with second hand smoke. And it didn't make us tougher. It made us cancer patients.

Yes, in the old days people didn't use bicycle helmets or seat belts. My mom is not a "wimp" because she wears a seat belt. She's alive because she wears one.

The talking points in your post, which I've seen circulated in emails, are anti-consumer pro-corporate libertarian/right wing talking points. What's wrong with a little lead in your toys? Heck we had it in our paint when I was a kid, and we were just fine. Yeah, except for the kids who weren't just fine. We still deal with the effects of that in my area, with about 8% of the high school students in Detroit having some amount of lead poisoning. But hey, at least they aren't wimps.

The talking point that abuse by oppressors is something that people should just "deal with" is one that reinforces existing power structures (white straight male power structures). It's a notion that gives support to abusers, an attitude that is related to women staying in abusive relationships (just be strong, deal with it). It puts the blame on the victim, and emphasizes macho stereotypes over justice, respect, and human rights.

[flvegan]

240. Today's bully has a great deal more resources to invoke pain and suffering.

I'm 38, and grew up when you did. I agree with many of your assertions of how we lived. Bullies in my (our) day, you might have to deal with a couple times a day. Maybe only once a month. Now, a "bully" has the ability to harass and intimidate, slander and threaten 24/7 via the internet and to an audience we never dreamed of. Mental abuse can be far worse than physical abuse.

We're not becoming a nation of wimps. We're a nation of assholes.

[saltpoint]

242. flvegan, on a few things out there in the world we may

disagree but my overall impression of you is that I want to buy you the coldest beer in town and have a long conversation.

That's not a pick-up line, only strong and well-deserved praise.

Happy New Year to you.

[flvegan]

244. I love a cold beer.

And that is some high praise, thank you. I'd absolutely take you up on that beer/conversation offer. Disagreement on this and that, but agreement on this and that only make the conversation better.

Happy New Year to you, saltpoint.

[CreekDog]

262. +1

times infinity.

[Midlodemocrat]

263. +1. Love you.

[grahamhgreen]

245. I think we may have simply lost our compassion.

[cherish44]

249. I personally think kids are a lot meaner now than they were when I was a kid

I witness this first hand because I have a child in 8th grade. Kids are complete assholes with no sense of decency or manners. Believe me a 1981 bully is a lot different than a 2009 bully. (The solutions for bullies hasn't changed much though...My daughter took care of her bully. Bully started a fight, daughter gave bully a boot to the head. No more bully problems.)

[izzybeans]

252. If you are over 50, your generation likely hid the fact of a suicide on the death certificate.

Besides elderly white males have the highest suicide rates in this country and suicide rates for adolescents started to increase drastically in the 1960s (CDC). We have been a nation of wimps f0r a long time if we take suicide as a measurement of toughness.

When I was in high school, there was a champion caliber wrestler at a neighboring school with a long history of winning the state championship in wrestling. He killed himself because the coach brutalized him and his teammates physically. He was no wimp, but he was a teenager. His coach, however, is still coaching.

[Karenina]

253. You are and have been a society of bullies

using technological advances to cover up your essential wimpiness. You scream like stuck pigs when someone COULD HAVE POTENTIALLY CAUSED HARM to you and yours, DEMANDING YOU BE SAFE, while from a distance CAUSING REAL HARM to so many around the world... Just a reflection of how you treat "your own."

[saltpoint]

254. Jesus god, Karenina. How did a mere mortal such as yourself ever

pick up such a huge broad brush?

[Karenina]

259. Forgive me, saltpoint.

It's the frustration borne of distance and witnessing the debilitating hypocrisy, the never-ending denial of it all from the micro to the macro. :hide:

Are all those kids who return to America's shores forever traumatized by the most horrific form of bullying "just wimps?" :shrug:

Suicide, in most people, is the final expression of such profound, intractable pain, much too often pain that may have been alleviated by an enlightened, caring community or society. And how often do those dedicated to alleviating that pain find THEMSELVES in a hostile environment? BULLIED->suicide=wimp is beyond my comprehension.

[saltpoint]

288. I do understand the frustration -- it's just that our military folks

do not want to be brave enough to even discuss PTSD, nevermind acknowledge that it is significantly recurrent in the lives of the soldiers.

True also, I'm guessing, in the lives of other nations' soldiers, and all of them, men, women, vets, or rookies, are owed every consideration and support for their mental health.

It might be a soldier overwhelmed by the despair and violence she sees in Afghanistan or elsewhere, or a kid in middle school being savagely bullied and dismissed by peers.

If somebody falls, ya help 'em up.

I do enjoy your posts and let me take this chance to say Happy 2010 to you and your friends and kin.

[Karenina]

297. Danke, saltpoint und ebenso!!!

:hi:

[Taitertots]

255. All those things you associate with the "old times" are amazingly terrible

Are you really trying to advocate that we return to playing with liquid mercury?
Thousands of people have died from second hand smoke from enclosed areas with heavy smokers.
Seat belts and modern car safety saves countless lives every year.


Your view of the past seems dystopia to me. People just realized that it is better to be alive then to pretend to be a badass.

[KansDem]

256. Take a look at the protest videos coming out of Iran...

...then look at what we did after the Supreme Court ruled in Bush v. Gore.

Yeah, we're wimps...

[northernlights]

258. the bullies are the wimps

They are cowards, and may have been made cowardly by all the excess "protections" you listed. Courageous people suffer their own pain. If they choose to opt out because their pain is too great and they see no end to it, that does not make them wimpy.

Turning your self-hatred onto others, forcing them to suffer their own pain AND yours, is wimpy.

In other words, you've got it backwards.

[Skidmore]

260. Experiencing hardship is not the same thing as being bullied.

YOu can experience hardship with respect and dignity, although the likelihood of you being bullied increases when you can't afford to be the coolest kid around. Do not conflate the two. Bullying or scapegoating is something else entirely.

[Cleobulus]

261. Just because you survived your childhood doesn't mean everyone else did back then...

Why do you think seatbelts are mandatory now, helmets are encouraged, etc? Simply because your generation suffered a hell of a lot more than generations since, you lived, but apparently you didn't learn, too bad a lot more of your generation were maimed or killed than was necessary.

[Midlodemocrat]

264. One year when I was teaching high school 6 kids committed

suicide. Wimps? No. Discouraged? Yes. Depressed? Probably.

Never thought I'd see such a right wing, hateful post on this site.

[KittyWampus]

269. SIX! My word. Did you and the other teachers discuss it?

[Midlodemocrat]

276. Of course.

But suicide is often contagious when dealing with teenagers.

[Trillo]

265. The last question is an example of contrarian thought.

There's little wrong with questioning, however, I believe the answer is no.

Others in this thread responded with a great deal of compassion and knowledge, and to all of you I give my sincere thanks!

Thank You

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

267. I wouldn't call it a society of wimps.

Wimps who can't handle bullies are a very small, if very obnoxious, minority.

[Harry Monroe]

268. Not wimps, but I think it has to do with the willingness to not "sweep".

things like this under the rug any longer. I was bullied as a child mercilessly by a kid much larger than me. I finally solved said problem by kicking the asshole in the balls. He never bothered me again. As far as the other things in your article, I'm 47 and remember the good old days well when we played outdoors all day during the summer and got dirty and scuffed up. I had grass cutting jobs one per day during the summer from Monday through Saturday and cut the yards once a week. My son complains when he has to cut grass at my home or even unload the dishwasher!! Hell I even ate mud pies when I was a kid!! On a lot of things nowadays, I believe the current generation of children and teenagers are soft and wimpy, but not on bullying. It affected kids in different ways then just as it does now.

[RedCappedBandit]

271. No. We're just more honest about the issues children must deal with

By the way, do you happen to have a link that backs up your assertion that kids are more likely to commit suicide today than in the past?

[Midlodemocrat]

272. Prayers for Bobby is on Lifetime right now.

What a loser wimp that kid was. Killing himself because his family disowned him due to the fact that he was gay.

:sarcasm:

[dsc]

293. I vividly remember that story when it was first told on 20/20

It both both broke my heart and scared the hell out of me. I told my parents around the time that story broke. I watched the movie on lifetime when it first was aired. Fantastic performances all around.

[Darth_Kitten]

277. Bullying in all forms is very destructive.

Too many people rather belittle bullying.

I was tormented by workplace bullies, and it drove me to a doctor's. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and was made a nervous wreck.

I'm not a weak person, I'm not a wimp, and I'm not cruel, but I could really understand people who went postal. You just want to be left alone.

[LouKneeLib]

281. Hmmm.

Wow. That post is sickening. Copy and paste from Freeperville?

[Bluebear]

282. Welcome to DU and thank you.

[Paladin]

287. Freeper-Level Propaganda Has No Place Here At DU.

Knuckle-drag yourself into the 21st century.......

[benEzra]

290. In "the old days", I suspect the people at the bottom of the social totem pole

were often driven to suicide by those who chose to physically and psychologically assault them, just as now.

It's not a question of wimpiness. The word "bullying" is a convenient euphemism for assault, battery, torture, and theft against the weakest members of a group, and turning a blind eye to it isn't "strength," it's cowardice.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

292. Young women died at a higher rate than they do now, too.

High school and college women died at a higher rate than they do now.

My dad was born in 1911. He graduated from high school in 1929.

He said lots of girls got illegal abortions, and died, and nobody ever talked about it.

I have read old newspapers that had notices like "Miss X, age 19, of Chagrin and Embarrassment Falls, Ohio, was found dead on Tuesday, according to Officer Bovine of the local Police Department. No obvious cause of death was found."

Yet another example of the BAD OLD DAYS.


:wtf:

[treestar]

291. The reason all of those things have been eliminated

Or an attempt has been made, is that somebody did die or get hurt. Just because it wasn't you or your friends does not mean that those things weren't dangerous.

Somebody was probably paralyzed from hitting their head when they fell off a bicycle. If that happens fewer times because of the helmets, it is that many fewer lives lived in a state of paralysis. Or fewer deaths.

I hate these shitty we-were-so-superior-in-the-past and much tougher internet idiocies. We were just lucky we weren't the ones that suffered the consequences, that's all.

As for bullies, they should be considered the ones with something wrong with them. They are the sickos. We should quit treating them as normal parts of the landscape everyone else should just deal with.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

294. The product liability suits stopped a lot of dangerous toys.

Like Jarts, for instance. That case was in one of my law books.
And the establishment of crib and baby seat standards.
And the establishment of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. All things that right wingers hate.

[elshiva]

295. Did you walk 20 miles to school in the snow barefoot, uphill, both ways?

[DailyGrind51]

298. Or, a society which accepts bullying as a desirable "right of passage"?

"Might makes right" and all that "survival of the fittest" stuff.