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[MetalSlimeHunt]

They tend not to do that anymore unless it's a serious case, as jumping to surgery as a cure for tonsillitis has kind of been debunked.

[Sirus]

Yeah, that's what mom said as well. Not that I'm complaining, having surgery would put me off work for a hell of a lot longer than a bunch of pills.

[SalmonGod]

Well, as someone who had to deal with bullying, I can say that everyone has a breaking point. After said breaking point, logic flies out the window. You stop giving a damn about the consequences, and just want the person that caused you to reach the breaking point to suffer.

Only been there once...

7th grade music class.  We were watching The Sound of Music.  Just a couple minutes into the movie, the kid behind me started spitting on the back of my neck, kicking my chair, and laughing openly about it.  I locked eyes with the teacher, expecting him to do something.  He just blankly stared right back at me.  Not a single other person in the room acknowledged what was happening in any way.  This went on the entire class period.

None of my classmates of the past four years had ever expressed respect or concern for me, and most wouldn't hesitate to laugh at my expense.  I understood that no one was on my side.  I had already seen several instances where other kids were punished for standing up to bullying.  I took the teacher's inaction as meaning that I either put up with it or face consequences.  So I just glared at him and waited.

40 minutes later, my vision had slowly flooded with a deep shade of red, as I'd entered this disturbingly calm state, and I swear I was no longer in control of my own thoughts.  It was like my conscious, waking self had slipped into the back seat, while some other being had taken the wheel.  This other being was very serenely planning in great visual detail how I was going to spontaneously leap up and beat this kid to death with my desk.  And I really was going to.  I could feel my muscles begin to tense in preparation.

Then the bell rang, and I snapped out of it.  I filed out of the classroom with everyone else, and no one said a word about what had been happening.  My entire upper backside was soaked in saliva.

So yeah... breaking points are a very real thing, and it's not a matter of choice when that point is reached.

[MaximumZero]

SG: Most of us don't have the luxury of that "warmup period" that you described, where your brain plans to do something you don't want to do. It just happens, and then you regret it.

[Vector]

I have a friend who tags me in all her romance and erotica novel posts, because I like reading :<

[SalmonGod]

SG: Most of us don't have the luxury of that "warmup period" that you described, where your brain plans to do something you don't want to do. It just happens, and then you regret it.

Yeah... I understand that I have a much, much longer fuse than the vast majority of people.  I've also been gouged in the arm with a pen, shoved into a large rusty nail that tore my leg open, my head smashed into a brick wall, punched in the head a few times, and plenty more (all at school) without ever retaliating or coming close to losing control.  That one instance was the only time I've ever truly hit that breaking point, and experienced total loss of control.  I didn't even understand what had just been happening in my own mind until after the fact.

But that was meant to act as reinforcement to the idea that a breaking point simply is what it is.  Having experienced it, I can understand how involuntary it is, and that it can happen anyone.

[Dutchling]

What kind of fucked up schools do you guys even go to?

[Parsely]

What kind of fucked up schools do you guys even go to?

[Frumple]

... normal ones, from everything I've seen and heard. There's usually at least a few getting treated along those lines in every school. S'only so much teachers can/will do, and there's not much better at breeding viciousness than bundles of hormones stuck inside a half-arsed attempt at a creche system for 6-8(+) hours straight.

[Korbac]

I'd like to reiterate for the millionth time that I'm so glad I live in Wales and not in America, where I would probably be killed now or have become a psychopathic murderer.

Frumple : I've been in what I'd consider a moderately rough school, and shit that bad happened very, very rarely, if at all.

Then again a guy did throw a brick at my head which would have almost certainly killed me had it not missed, but he was nuts.

[Parsely]

... normal ones, from everything I've seen and heard. There's usually at least a few getting treated along those lines in every school. S'only so much teachers can/will do, and there's not much better at breeding viciousness than bundles of hormones stuck inside a half-arsed attempt at a creche system for 6-8(+) hours straight.

During all my time alive, inside and outside of school, literally none of those things have ever come even close to happening to me or anyone I know (at least not inflicted consciously/with malicious intent by other people). Especially not while teachers were watching. Those things that SalmonGod mentioned all sound like grounds for instant expulsion. I know dudes were expelled for far less. At least in high school. In middle school there's so much more leniency about that kind of thing.

I'd like to reiterate for the millionth time that I'm so glad I live in Wales and not in America, where I would probably be killed now or have become a psychopathic murderer.

Frumple's situation is definitely NOT reflective of the average person's everyday life in America.

[BFEL]

Wow. Theres like 4 pages of this discussion. Fuck.

Anyway can society as a whole just admit that we like violence already? I'm so sick and tired of people pretending they hate it while practically jacking off to it when no one's watching.


As for what makes ME sads, I'm 22 and my life isn't going anywhere. Pretty common problem here, but most of you guys are in college or something that slowly progresses you forward. Me, I'm a fucking paperboy. The only reason I continue to do this job is because my mom messed her ankle up really bad and got a blood clot, so she pretty much can't work at all. I feel like my only choices are "continue doing this and never even BEGIN to work on your own life and dreams" or "run off for yourself like a selfish dickbag and leave your mom to starve"

And that's a fucked up choice.

[Frumple]

Frumple's situation is definitely NOT reflective of the average person's everyday life in America.

It isn't, no, but I hear the same sort of things coming from... well, pretty much everywhere. Urban areas, rural areas, east coast, west coast, north, south... abuse to varying degrees (and frankly, what I've been through and personally seen was very tame compared to some places and the experience of several on this forum. No murders!) is just something that seems pretty ubiquitous. How much the teachers look away vary, but so does how much they're aware of, and someone slipping through the cracks of monitoring and good will just seems to happen more often than it doesn't.

Of course, no, it's particularly not reflective of the average person's everyday life, because they're fitting comfortably into cultural norms and not ending up with targets painted on them. Most folks, from what I've seen, at best barely even notice when stuff like that happens. Least until it gets plastered over the local media or whatev', bleh.

[SalmonGod]

... normal ones, from everything I've seen and heard. There's usually at least a few getting treated along those lines in every school. S'only so much teachers can/will do, and there's not much better at breeding viciousness than bundles of hormones stuck inside a half-arsed attempt at a creche system for 6-8(+) hours straight.

The school I've been referring to was worse than most, I think.  Teachers were aware of almost everything that happened to me, and never did the slightest thing on my behalf.  I think the most a teacher ever stuck up for me was once in the locker room four seniors were dragging me screaming towards a bathroom stall to stuff my head in the filthy toilet (something I thankfully never did experience), and the gym teacher walked by and threw out a casual "Hey, cut it out guys"... and they actually stopped.  Which was weird, because that same gym teacher witnessed worse things done to me and never said a word to those.  He walked by as a classmate was screaming gibberish and nearly all-out assaulting me, and didn't say a word.  Another teacher once joined in with other students in dumping out all the contents of my backpack and tossing them around the room for half a class period, and then into the trash.  I could go on and on :/

I went to that school for 8 years.  Then moved to a different one for my last two years of high school.  The teachers there seemed to genuinely care.  There was still bullying that went on, but it wasn't endorsed or conducted within full view of the faculty.  That place managed to put me back on a path into adulthood that wasn't completely, irreversibly broken.

I think there's a lot of variation in attitudes between school systems, and local politics also play a very large part in just how much crap schools are able to get away with.  It seems to me like the more rural the school is, the more likely it is to be fucked up.  But I wouldn't quite call my experiences a normal thing to be happening at your average school.

[Pnx]

Hmmm, well when I lived in France when I was 5 I had a pretty a hellish experience in school. My mother couldn't find any English speaking schools for me to go to, IIRC the only one she could find was a hideously expensive private school. So she did the next best thing and found me a French teacher that spoke good English who could teach me French, the thing was this teacher had a rather brutal way of trying to teach me, she would stop lessons and grill me in front of the whole class with questions, and if I ever responded in English, or with the wrong French, she would hit me with her ruler and tell me the right words.
Then there were the other kids... the other kids in that class seriously hated me, and the teacher tended to let the class go out to break with absolutely no supervision while she went to eat lunch (it was a pretty small school as I remember it, only a few classrooms, and they cycled using the playground), the kids basically liked to lynch me for amusement, I have a lot of blurry memories of being surrounded by kids who were hitting me, and being squashed by the weight several of them. I took to climbing up the tree as soon as the break started, and would only climb down when the rest of the kids were inside.

Then when we moved back to the UK, I had a much older bully who explicitly singled me out and decided to make my life miserable, for... I'm really not sure why, I think it was something to do with being able to speak French, but maybe that was just an excuse?

He basically like kicking the crap out of me too, and did a lot of vindictive and manipulative stuff, like trying to coerce other kids into isolating me with threats of violence, spreading a lot of lies, and of course the old fashioned randomly attacking me and then telling the teachers that I'd started attacking him and he was just defending himself...
The teachers actually mostly sided with him to start with, apparently he'd always been very well behaved up until he'd randomly started getting into fights with a much younger student in his last two years. He may have had some abusive father issues from what I heard, I don't know.

Then because of these experiences I spent the next several years often violently fighting against going to school because it was an activity I associated with a lot of bad things... but then things got better when I went to a special needs school in the Netherlands that... basically did everything right. They didn't give in and send me home or anything when I threw temper tantrums, and they just... generally did a good job of trying to cater to what I needed rather than what I wanted, it was effective.

I don't think I had any real bad experiences from then on, after I graduated that school and went on to Dutch high school which sucked, then we moved to the States, and barring one or two incidents I generally never got in any fights with anyone. I think the worst thing that happened was when one guy I'd been helping with his math he errr... well, I wouldn't let him copy my math work... he was doing the annoying, "please show me how to do problem 1... oh great, could you show me 2 as well?... how about 3?", thing. Then when I called him out on this and said he really needed to do the work himself because he needs the practice, he stood up at the end of class and shouted to his friend rather loudly "Hey <friend's name>, you know how smart <Pnx> is? He's so smart right? And he thinks he's so much better than everyone else, I could really see how someone could just walk up and shoot him, I mean really just get a gun and shoot him... I mean I wouldn't, but I could totally see that happening to him, right? I think something like that might happen to him soon."
It was kind of a shot to the gut because I spent ages working my butt off trying to teach him this stuff.

Them's my experiences, I don't know.