Okay, this one's been bugging me for a long time. Staring is not a form of assault.
The concept of assault rests on the basis that people have an inherent right to control what goes on with their own bodies, and that doing anything to another person's body without their consent is wrong. Rights conflict in the real world, which is why we need to establish rules. The classic example is "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose".
I have a right to control my own body, and that includes what direction my eyes face. Since my eyes are devices for detecting radiation rather than for emitting it, what direction my eyes face impacts no one. In the conflict between my right to point my eyes where I please, and your right not to have someone point their eyes in your direction, the right to control one's own body trumps the right to force someone else to do something with their body you don't like.
I don't live in a society where we worship god-kings who can demand I downcast my gaze when they grace my presence. I will not live in such a society.
The last time someone tried to treat my gaze as an assault, I was quite ready to meet their explicitly threatened violence with violence of my own. I have no regrets about my actions in that incident.
Showing posts with label bullying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bullying. Show all posts
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Why I Haven't Killed Myself
It's hard to start writing about a suicide attempt, because every time I put metaphorical pen to paper, I'm reminded of all the wonderful things in my life, and all the ways I have it easier than other people. That doesn't help the depression, indeed, the guilt at feeling depressed in spite of those things only deepens the depression and the sense of worthlessness.
It's only years later that I've been able to contextualize what happened and recognize that's precisely what it was, a suacide attempt.
A bit of background. I've always been hyperaware of the legal situation that young people are in, and this dates from my time resenting it from well on the other side of the age line. My parents were and are wonderful people, but that didn't change the fact that they wielded arbitrary power against which I had no legal recourse. They weren't perfect, obviously, but if they had been less wonderful people... well, the stories are in the news all the time. Teachers were where I got a taste of what it feels like when someone with that kind of arbitrary power wants to use it against you. Again, it was never as bad for me as some, but it did happen, and the psychological pain was quite real.
Meanwhile, I was also quite isolated from my peers. I'm a natural introvert. To this day, after spending time among friends who's company I genuinely enjoy, I need to take time alone to decompress, unwind, and recover from the social activity.
When I was bullied, I was never able to view it as a temporary condition. The old "tell an adult" advice was tried, then rejected when the best outcome was the immediate cessation of hostilities, followed by a worse and more persistent campaign the instant the adult's back was turned, and the worst outcome was the adult disbelieving my words and heaping additional scorn on me, followed by a ramping up of hostilities from the initial bullies in retribution for trying to tell on them. I saw no value in the "fight back" school of thought, because I knew that if I hurt them, all that would mean was added motivation for them to hurt me even worse.
I decided fairly early on, as a result, that the only way anything would actually change would be if I fought back hard enough and vicious enough that whether they were willing to come back later and resume and redouble their torments would be irrelevant, because they would be physically unable to do so. Basically, the only way to ensure any permanent change to the status quo would be to kill one of them. I didn't have it in me to do that, which I spent considerable time berating myself over. Whether by nature or nurture, I couldn't bring myself to try to kill someone in cold blood, no matter how airtight the logic I presented myself with.
I considered just killing myself. I was quite capable of self-harming, even if I couldn't direct those destructive impulses outward. But suicide was something I realized I'd have to get right. The idea of suicide as a "cry for help" made zero sense to me. Everyone who actually gave a shit about me was presumably doing what they could already, and everyone else wouldn't care anyway, so who was going to listen to a "cry for help" suicide attempt? The only two outcomes in my mind were that I would successfully die, or that I would fuck it up, the normal bullying would continue as before, only now I'd have to deal with whatever potentially crippling injuries I'd inflicted on myself during the botched attempt.
I can easily see why people going on antidepressants are at higher risk for suicide. I didn't kill myself during that period because I was convinced I'd fuck it up and only make things worse for myself. If I had enough hope that I could do it right, or maybe that something would change after the attempt if I did botch the job, it's easy to see myself moving forward with it.
Things did eventually change for me after what I now recognize probably qualified as a suicide attempt. I was attacked in the school hallway, and I snapped. The only coherent thought in my mind through the red haze of anger was that one of us was going to die there, and I didn't care who. Either I'd end his life and thus make sure he at least, could never hurt me again, or I'd make him kill me to stop me. I was well aware that the later outcome was far more likely, as evidenced by my inability to land a single punch, even as most of the bones in my face were shattered by repeated blows to the head.
Of course, the fact that I'm able to write this should be proof enough that I failed. Some of the staff pulled us apart, and that was when things got interesting. The school attempted to downplay the incident, even as I was hospitalized, requiring reconstructive surgery. My parents pushed and the courts were eventually involved. I don't know for sure what happened to the bully who attacked me, only that he wasn't in the school after that.
After that object lesson in how vulnerable I was, and how little the school could or would do to protect me, my parents got me involved with martial arts, which helped both my actual safety, and my sense of security. I've never had to use it since I began studying nearly two decades ago.
This incident happened before I'd worked out my orientation, so this incident was there in the background as I was coming to terms with the prejudice I was going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. Since then, tons of people have tried to goad me into suicide and self-destructive behavior. I can't imagine why they think I'd even consider it knowing they'd count it as a win.
It's only years later that I've been able to contextualize what happened and recognize that's precisely what it was, a suacide attempt.
A bit of background. I've always been hyperaware of the legal situation that young people are in, and this dates from my time resenting it from well on the other side of the age line. My parents were and are wonderful people, but that didn't change the fact that they wielded arbitrary power against which I had no legal recourse. They weren't perfect, obviously, but if they had been less wonderful people... well, the stories are in the news all the time. Teachers were where I got a taste of what it feels like when someone with that kind of arbitrary power wants to use it against you. Again, it was never as bad for me as some, but it did happen, and the psychological pain was quite real.
Meanwhile, I was also quite isolated from my peers. I'm a natural introvert. To this day, after spending time among friends who's company I genuinely enjoy, I need to take time alone to decompress, unwind, and recover from the social activity.
When I was bullied, I was never able to view it as a temporary condition. The old "tell an adult" advice was tried, then rejected when the best outcome was the immediate cessation of hostilities, followed by a worse and more persistent campaign the instant the adult's back was turned, and the worst outcome was the adult disbelieving my words and heaping additional scorn on me, followed by a ramping up of hostilities from the initial bullies in retribution for trying to tell on them. I saw no value in the "fight back" school of thought, because I knew that if I hurt them, all that would mean was added motivation for them to hurt me even worse.
I decided fairly early on, as a result, that the only way anything would actually change would be if I fought back hard enough and vicious enough that whether they were willing to come back later and resume and redouble their torments would be irrelevant, because they would be physically unable to do so. Basically, the only way to ensure any permanent change to the status quo would be to kill one of them. I didn't have it in me to do that, which I spent considerable time berating myself over. Whether by nature or nurture, I couldn't bring myself to try to kill someone in cold blood, no matter how airtight the logic I presented myself with.
I considered just killing myself. I was quite capable of self-harming, even if I couldn't direct those destructive impulses outward. But suicide was something I realized I'd have to get right. The idea of suicide as a "cry for help" made zero sense to me. Everyone who actually gave a shit about me was presumably doing what they could already, and everyone else wouldn't care anyway, so who was going to listen to a "cry for help" suicide attempt? The only two outcomes in my mind were that I would successfully die, or that I would fuck it up, the normal bullying would continue as before, only now I'd have to deal with whatever potentially crippling injuries I'd inflicted on myself during the botched attempt.
I can easily see why people going on antidepressants are at higher risk for suicide. I didn't kill myself during that period because I was convinced I'd fuck it up and only make things worse for myself. If I had enough hope that I could do it right, or maybe that something would change after the attempt if I did botch the job, it's easy to see myself moving forward with it.
Things did eventually change for me after what I now recognize probably qualified as a suicide attempt. I was attacked in the school hallway, and I snapped. The only coherent thought in my mind through the red haze of anger was that one of us was going to die there, and I didn't care who. Either I'd end his life and thus make sure he at least, could never hurt me again, or I'd make him kill me to stop me. I was well aware that the later outcome was far more likely, as evidenced by my inability to land a single punch, even as most of the bones in my face were shattered by repeated blows to the head.
Of course, the fact that I'm able to write this should be proof enough that I failed. Some of the staff pulled us apart, and that was when things got interesting. The school attempted to downplay the incident, even as I was hospitalized, requiring reconstructive surgery. My parents pushed and the courts were eventually involved. I don't know for sure what happened to the bully who attacked me, only that he wasn't in the school after that.
After that object lesson in how vulnerable I was, and how little the school could or would do to protect me, my parents got me involved with martial arts, which helped both my actual safety, and my sense of security. I've never had to use it since I began studying nearly two decades ago.
This incident happened before I'd worked out my orientation, so this incident was there in the background as I was coming to terms with the prejudice I was going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. Since then, tons of people have tried to goad me into suicide and self-destructive behavior. I can't imagine why they think I'd even consider it knowing they'd count it as a win.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Bullying and School Shootings
I've been bullied.
I know that there are those among you who will take the opportunity to use this fact against me, to use it to discount my arguments, and to attempt to perform the closest approximation of violence available through a text based exchange. I know that will be the result because that has been the result countless times I've brought this fact up. If you think any of that is going to silence me, I'll again direct you to reread the introductory post, and you ask yourself why you think you can hurt or intimidate me into silence after I opened with that.
Bullying is my top youth rights issue. More than voting, more than age of consent, more than property rights. So if I care so much about this one, why wait so long to post anything about it? Because the problems associated with this issue are so painfully obvious not one of them would need to be said out loud in a sane universe. And as such, this post requires I put into words basic human decency. And because the heartbreaking consequences of people so universally failing to act on this issue mean I tend to get omnicidal when I resume thinking about it, and that isn't conductive to careful, thoughtful analysis or persuasive writing.
Social rules are a series of lines we draw between ourselves and others. Boundaries need to be agreed upon, and thereafter respected. Much bullying is crossing one or two of those boundaries by just the tiniest degree. Once that's been done, the bully relies on the fact that the infraction was small to shield him/her from consequences, then does it again. And again. And again.
Bullying is not a single incident. It isn't one kid beating you up, or stealing from you. That isn't what it is at all. Bullying is a pattern of such incidents. Bullying is a prolonged campaign of physical, psychological, and social attacks, each individually below the threshold that the authorities would care about, but collectively adding up to be too much for the victim to handle. Bullying is slow torture, and needs to be treated as such.
So much advice we give kids fails to take this pattern into account. We tell them to "tell an adult", but when a kid comes to an adult authority figure with a minor complaint, the adult is frustrated at the kid's inability to deal with something so minor. So that adult says "just ignore it", not recognizing that this is a pattern, perpetrated by someone who will delight in the victim bottling up their obvious discomfort as they proceed to escalate the violence while the kid still has that "just ignore it" advice ringing in their ears.
Which brings us to the "fight back, bullies are cowards" advice. There's only one healthy response to a prolonged campaign of torture that's being actively ignored by the authorities. Whatever it takes to make it stop. And a victim can't simply match like for like. Repaying each small violation with a small violation of their own against their tormenter. The tormenter will simply delight in their ability to provoke this new response. So when we tell the victim to fight back, the only answer for them is to make it stop by any means necessary. If that means someone ends up hospitalized, so be it, if that means someone ends up dead because the authorites refused to intervene when the situation was minor. So. Be. It.
That's why everyone knows that it's the victims of bullying who get into trouble and the bullies themselves are left to roam free. Bullies know exactly where the line is between their victim being comfortable and not, and they also know exactly where the line is where their activity is too minor for any single incident to be responded to meaningfully by the authorities. When a victim fights back, they don't keep that line in mind, because they've learned that the authorities aren't an issue, because the authorities have been ignoring months, or years of torture right in front of their eyes.
Of course, it isn't always that way. Sometimes we have a real simple case for the authorities to handle. A good old fashioned beating incident where the victim is attacked and left bloody. And again the authorities fail. What happened here is called "assault and battery". It is a criminal offense. The appropriate response to it is a criminal trial and criminal penalties.
That is the social contract every citizen is included in, adult or child. Instead, authority figures in the school cover it up. They minimize the incident to the parents, using phrases like "boys will be boys". They pressure parents not to press charges. And they again teach the victim that their pain will be ignored, and that the bully can act with impunity. That the social contract does not protect them, and will only ever be used to hurt them.
Shootings aren't a cry for attention. The victims who snap and start shooting people don't want attention. They know attention won't fix anything. They've been taught that the social contract doesn't apply to them, and that the only way that anything will ever change for the better is if they, on their own, make it impossible for things to continue as they had.
What these people are doing is solving problems in a perfectly natural way. Without the social contract, this is the standard way human beings settle disputes. We created the social contract in order to prevent incidents like this. That is the only reason we have the social contract.
Given how utterly useless the social contract has been in protecting tormented minors who are forced, day in and day out, to spend the majority of their waking hours in close proximity to their tormentors while authority figures ignore and minimize the abuse they're suffering, you should all feel blessed that shootings are as unfathomably rare as they are.
I know that there are those among you who will take the opportunity to use this fact against me, to use it to discount my arguments, and to attempt to perform the closest approximation of violence available through a text based exchange. I know that will be the result because that has been the result countless times I've brought this fact up. If you think any of that is going to silence me, I'll again direct you to reread the introductory post, and you ask yourself why you think you can hurt or intimidate me into silence after I opened with that.
Bullying is my top youth rights issue. More than voting, more than age of consent, more than property rights. So if I care so much about this one, why wait so long to post anything about it? Because the problems associated with this issue are so painfully obvious not one of them would need to be said out loud in a sane universe. And as such, this post requires I put into words basic human decency. And because the heartbreaking consequences of people so universally failing to act on this issue mean I tend to get omnicidal when I resume thinking about it, and that isn't conductive to careful, thoughtful analysis or persuasive writing.
Social rules are a series of lines we draw between ourselves and others. Boundaries need to be agreed upon, and thereafter respected. Much bullying is crossing one or two of those boundaries by just the tiniest degree. Once that's been done, the bully relies on the fact that the infraction was small to shield him/her from consequences, then does it again. And again. And again.
Bullying is not a single incident. It isn't one kid beating you up, or stealing from you. That isn't what it is at all. Bullying is a pattern of such incidents. Bullying is a prolonged campaign of physical, psychological, and social attacks, each individually below the threshold that the authorities would care about, but collectively adding up to be too much for the victim to handle. Bullying is slow torture, and needs to be treated as such.
So much advice we give kids fails to take this pattern into account. We tell them to "tell an adult", but when a kid comes to an adult authority figure with a minor complaint, the adult is frustrated at the kid's inability to deal with something so minor. So that adult says "just ignore it", not recognizing that this is a pattern, perpetrated by someone who will delight in the victim bottling up their obvious discomfort as they proceed to escalate the violence while the kid still has that "just ignore it" advice ringing in their ears.
Which brings us to the "fight back, bullies are cowards" advice. There's only one healthy response to a prolonged campaign of torture that's being actively ignored by the authorities. Whatever it takes to make it stop. And a victim can't simply match like for like. Repaying each small violation with a small violation of their own against their tormenter. The tormenter will simply delight in their ability to provoke this new response. So when we tell the victim to fight back, the only answer for them is to make it stop by any means necessary. If that means someone ends up hospitalized, so be it, if that means someone ends up dead because the authorites refused to intervene when the situation was minor. So. Be. It.
That's why everyone knows that it's the victims of bullying who get into trouble and the bullies themselves are left to roam free. Bullies know exactly where the line is between their victim being comfortable and not, and they also know exactly where the line is where their activity is too minor for any single incident to be responded to meaningfully by the authorities. When a victim fights back, they don't keep that line in mind, because they've learned that the authorities aren't an issue, because the authorities have been ignoring months, or years of torture right in front of their eyes.
Of course, it isn't always that way. Sometimes we have a real simple case for the authorities to handle. A good old fashioned beating incident where the victim is attacked and left bloody. And again the authorities fail. What happened here is called "assault and battery". It is a criminal offense. The appropriate response to it is a criminal trial and criminal penalties.
That is the social contract every citizen is included in, adult or child. Instead, authority figures in the school cover it up. They minimize the incident to the parents, using phrases like "boys will be boys". They pressure parents not to press charges. And they again teach the victim that their pain will be ignored, and that the bully can act with impunity. That the social contract does not protect them, and will only ever be used to hurt them.
Shootings aren't a cry for attention. The victims who snap and start shooting people don't want attention. They know attention won't fix anything. They've been taught that the social contract doesn't apply to them, and that the only way that anything will ever change for the better is if they, on their own, make it impossible for things to continue as they had.
What these people are doing is solving problems in a perfectly natural way. Without the social contract, this is the standard way human beings settle disputes. We created the social contract in order to prevent incidents like this. That is the only reason we have the social contract.
Given how utterly useless the social contract has been in protecting tormented minors who are forced, day in and day out, to spend the majority of their waking hours in close proximity to their tormentors while authority figures ignore and minimize the abuse they're suffering, you should all feel blessed that shootings are as unfathomably rare as they are.
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