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Voices From The Hellmouth Revisited: Part Two
"I was picked on in high school. I actually snapped at one point, I was sent home for standing up in the middle of class and screaming at some jocks who were throwing paper footballs at me. Summed up I told them to f-off and die, they told me it was I who would die. I stopped and looked around and realized the silliness of it all and proceeded to laugh. They thought I was laughing at the threat of death. I was sent to the office and held for about an hour, didn't stop laughing the whole time, they finally sent me home for the day. On my way home, during lunch hour, the jocks actually hit me with their car (5 mph) and proceeded to whup me. One small problem with their plan, my parents in one of their "let's boost his self esteem plans," enrolled me in AIKIDO when I was in 6th grade. I was able to hold them off until the police came and hauled them away, assault with a deadly weapon (car). No one touched me ever again, I was actually praised for being able to hold my own."---R. (Original Comment #1)
"Actually, one reason my wife and I are willing to spend a painful amount of money on private schools is exactly because the good ones ARE far more egalitarian than the public schools. For instance, uniforms aren't to enforce conformity but to eliminate differences so the students can all relate to one another as equals. Making equality happen is a big deal in private schools, and completely ignored in public schools.
Part of this has to do with school size, too: it's just impossible to avoid the formation of poisonous cliques in a large school. What do we really expect to happen socially when we put 3000 people in a high school?" "To use sports as an example: Even those interested in sports or other activities haven't a chance unless they're pro material, the talent pool is just too big to allow players of average (or even above average!) skill on the teams, so we wind up with sports teams comprised of the same extreme physical specimanes that dominate college and professional sports. I would bet that there is a direct correlation between these sorts of incidents and school size. A smaller school creates a much better sense of belonging than the big impersonal windowless buildings in which we warehouse high schoolers today. If we continue to force adolescents into huge, impersonal overcrowded schools, Littletons will sadly become more common."---D. (Original Comment #2)
"Yeah, sure blame the parents, someone's got to be crucified, it's the American way. If these kids were as smart as the reports, they kept the stuff hidden till the last minute, after that, why bother hiding it. Probably explains the stuff left out in the homes. They had planned this for a year, probably had caches of stuff hidden all over waiting for the big day. I had my stash in the house when I was a kid, there was no way anyone would have found it without using dogs or metal detectors. Even then, they'd have to unscrew panels and take things apart to get to my hiding places. I could have kept guns, even rifles, hidden in the air ducts in the house. It's a good thing these two were smarter, it sounds like they were on the way to building Fuel-Air Explosives, those pack more punch than pipebombs. The SWAT team found propane tanks in the school, if they had worked, they would have made the school look like OKC. The unrelenting stress placed on them slowly made them go insane, the most deadly killers are made this way. Their peers are the ones who bear most of the blame for this." ---S. (Original Comment #3)
"Far from being idyllic, happy communities, high schools (including the one in question) are hellish social pressure cookers. High school society is strictly regimented into rigid hierarchies; at the top there are the athletes, the cheerleaders and the kids with rich parents; the alpha primates. At the very bottom of the food chain are those who do not fit in. The enviroment is a closed system; there is only one hierarchy, and nowhere to run. And failure to conform is relentlessly punished, not by the indifferent authorities but by the system itself. Systematic physical bullying goes on on a scale sometimes reminiscent of the English public school tradition of "fagging". The whole system is sadistically elegant; if latter-day Dante was writing an updated Inferno, he could scarcely find a better model than the social structures of the high school."
"This system evolved to serve a purpose; by ruthlessly punishing difference, rewarding conformity and reinforcing an immutable status quo, it creates the preconditions of a modern industrial society; a population of predictable, conditioned worker/consumer drones, people who accept their place in the great machine of society and don't make trouble. The relatively small number of murders and suicides is well within the margin of acceptable loss."
"Meanwhile, when the jocks and popular kids grow up, they take their places as leader-caste of society; and while most of them are, by then, relatively decent individuals, they do not see that there is a problem. Hence, when a bunch of black-clad angst puppies massacre some jocks and popular kids , the solution is obvious; sue the video-game companies, restrict the Internet, and ban aspects of outsider subcultures, such as black clothing. And so, the invisible hand increases the pressure even further."---A.C.B. (Original Comment #4)
"It's pretty sad, to fit in society today you have to be a shallow dumbass who is basically a clone of whoever happens to be the most popular kid in school. I can see why they did it, I don't think they should've, but I understand. Everyday we get this shit, people hate us because we don't conform, we are curious and intuitive. And we actually keep an open mind about things. And games and the Internet are the only thing keeping us from killing everyone. Games relieve our stress, and talking to other people helps because we can express ourselves and find people who are actually like us, and we aren't stereotyped for anything. We need to come together and give the government, the media, and the system a big fuck you." ---R. (Original Comment #5)
"I had the fortune (or the misfortune) of being on both sides of the social fence at different times in my schooling. I remember very clearly back in 6th grade when we had a new student come to our school. She happened to be very fat, and most of the kids (including myself) teased her incessantly. Well, after about half a year, she changed school districts; and I remember distinctly the gym teacher asking her if she's going to miss my elementary school, and she got up and looked at all of us, and said she's happy she's leaving because everyone had made her miserable at our school. The thing was, until that moment, I had never realized that she even had feelings or could be hurt. I was so wrapped up in doing what all the other kids were doing that I never realized exactly what I was doing."
"In high school, it was a somewhat opposite situation. Although I was never taunted or overtly ostracized, I was never part of the "in crowd" and, needless to say, never got invited to many parties. I was lucky enough though because I was in a large high school and I was able to find some close friends that I could identify with, and fortunately, I never really gave a damn what other people thought of me, so I never really felt left out. But I can certainly understand how one could easily feel that way. My point is that many kids in high school probably do the things they do because they don't realize what they're doing, or who they're hurting. It's only after they've been forced into seeing things from a different perspective that they understand what they've done. Some people never learn, but I think most people eventually learn and become decent people."
"Unfortunately I think the social situation in schools is largely ignored, probably mostly because it's a difficult problem and one that is not easily addressed (and we're a society that likes easy answers, not right ones). Whatever the cause of the massacre turns out to be, I'm sure we'll never know, because it won't be something the media can package in a nice ten minute time slot and add a cute teaser too. I think the best things we can do as adults is to make kids aware of each other, as people, regardless of which side of the fence they're on. After all these years, I still feel guilty about the girl in 6th grade that we taunted. I wish her well, and hope that she was able to get past the taunting without becoming too embittered (she was already fairly bitter at 12.)" ---Doug (Original Comment #6)
"High school isn't CRAP! Nothing I did there has helped me now. I have seen so many oppressed by what school thinks is right and wrong. Sometimes I myself feel like going back and beating the hell out of the principal at my brother's high school just because of the stupid crap they do to nonconformists. The new youth of America are not sheep! I can't see why anyone would miss high school. College yeah, high school to hell with it."---M. (Original Comment #7)
"For what it's worth to the many kids out there who are in the geek crowd, standing outside what's considered 'normal.' "I was exactly that in high school. The dangerous nerd who knew about eight times as much as the people around me. I was hacking out the oldies while my peers were looking for the cheapest beer they could smuggle. I wasn't the one with the best looking girlfriend or the hordes of adoring followers. I was different in every imaginable way. Well, I didn't bother assimilating. I didn't bother going mainstream and talking about my feelings or any of the New Age Warm Fuzzy stuff. I stuck to who I was, and even played it up a bit. Where am I now? Well, nearly a decade later, I'm the youngest senior exectuive at the healthcare company I work at. I make ridiculous amounts of money doing what I love: technology. In fact, I would say I probably make about three times what those high school peers of mine now make. All of the jocks, all of the "in" crowd hit their peak. They peaked too early, and they're now tired, old souls in life. Me? What was once called "weird" in hallway whispers is now written as "innovative" on performance reviews. What was once called "nerdy" is now "fast track to success". You may have to endure some awful things in the near future as the mainstream culture plays moral masturbation to make everyone feel better. Take the anger and the resentment you feel and direct it toward the goal I found: to beat every single naysayer and insulter, to take their world and not destroy it, but own it. The path in the real world awaits you if you can fuel your motivation with every insult you've ever received."---J.H.K. (Original Comment #8)
"God, I hated high school. I got the shit beat out of me several times. Not even one date because I was "different" and a "nerd". Small school, just 300 students. It was worse because of that, because I didn't even have one friend to talk to. The cliques, the jocks and their bimbos. Shit, what a piss poor way to spend 4 years. I ended up going to a community college instead of an university, because an university required one more year in that hell hole (grade 13, can you believe it?) Pisses me off even now, and that was 20 years ago."---Y. (Original Comment #9)
"I hated high school. High school, the act of getting up every fucking morning to walk through hallways of laughing happy people, to get shoved around by people I didn't even know, to get called names for the way I dressed, spoke. I had friends, very close friends, but we were a tight group because of the oppression and crap that got thrown at us every day. I remember getting slammed into lockers every day for two years, over and over, for being a little different. I remember teachers, especially the cokehead that stared down girl's shirts, simply turning away, knowing what was going on, but not caring. In my high school, you got kicked out for throwing a punch, so defending yourself from physical aggression lead to suspension. I don't support what the kids in Colorado did, I think it's repugnant, but I understand how they were driven to what they did. The parents, guidance counselors and administrators don't have the balls or intelligence, or compassion to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Unless people, that is, teenagers in our schools, somehow start treating each other like valuable human beings, instead of social doormats, this sort of slaughter is going to continue as more of the discontent snap. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be what is happening. It seems that, so predictably, there is yet another backlash against the geeks, freaks, nonconformists and kids who don't fit in. "Be normal" they will tell you, over and over, "try to get along", failing to realize that it's not you, but the savages that are stepping on you that are not being well behaved. To all that read this that are still stuck in high school: good luck with the next few years, my heart goes out to you. It should get better afterwards, it might not seem like it now, but there will be time after school when you can look back and think "How did I survive that?"---J.O. (Original Comment #10)
'Don't let people tell you that teasing is just "kid's stuff", either. Unpopular kids in school are often the helpless targets of truly sadistic and evil people and acts who make us feel like our lives are threatened. One friend had someone a full foot taller than him pick him up by the throat in front of an administrator with little consequence. Another encountered some schoolmates in a park at night, said hello to them by name, only to find himself attacked by a piece of pipe, have his arm broken and his bicycle stolen. The offenders got probation when he turned them in, and afterwards he daily felt his life in danger coming to the same school with these kids. One of my worst tormentors during high school, who spit on us daily and threw rocks and chewing tobacco in an attempt to start a fight, is now in jail. A few months after I graduated, he and his brother decided it would be fun to go out with baseball bats and find some homeless people to beat up. All in a good, white upper-middle class town. This is the type of people that outcasts are forced to deal with every day of their lives for years, and we're surprised when they lash out in revenge?"---A.C. (Original Comment #10)
"I agree that adolescence is a difficult, awkward, confusing time for most anybody. Wanting to fit in, wondering if anybody really likes you. It's harder for those who are on the bottom of the food chain, who feel like they're on the outside looking in. But to add the pressure of a witch hunt, on the slimmest of pretexts, that targets kids who are "different" in appearance, abilities, or social skills is just too much. To all you kids out there, I just want to say: hang on, it does get better. I know, easy to say, and doesn't help you much now. I have been through hell. I am so old that the harassment wasn't even computer-related (small joke). I didn't look right. I wasn't rich or popular or athletic. I wasn't a drama queen or a student government type. I didn't have to put up with physical abuse like some of you, but I was definitely harassed for being different. And lived to tell the story. Five years after high school, many of our classmates will have bumped into real life. The one or two who still think they're all it, you will find amusing. College, if you go, is a chance to re-invent yourself, where nobody knows what you're "supposed" to be like. For right now, cherish your friends. Follow your dreams. Do stuff that makes you feel good, like biking or swimming or getting that high score in your favorite computer game or learning to play a musical instrument. If you're smart, don't act dumb. If you're not the college type, that's cool too, but do something you like, something you're good at, not something you hate just because you think there might be lots of money in it. And you don't have to take any bull about the way you look or dress, or the games you like to play. Don't knock yourself out trying to be popular. It's not worth it. And remember, hate is not the way to go. If you hate people, they won, because you become like their mirror, and they control you. So hang on for dear life, and it will get better."---K.
This comment is freely distrutable under the GPL.
Oh man, where do I begin....
The school system just straight out failed my needs as a human more than anything. Just 1 bit of empathy from everyone I knew could have straightened things out, but alas, never came..
My gradeschool years were rough, not because of anything I did. I went to a school where all the parents made 6figure+ salaries and were married. Me? I only went there because my single divorced father worked in the neighborhood. Needless to say this was looked upon as strange by most of the faculty and students. Just because my parents were divorced I was singled out by the administration, my mental health was constantly being evaluated. They would have me talk to counselers at least once a week to "Find out how I was feeling" Did I mention this was 1979 before stuff like hopping kids up on ritalin was around? Oh yeah this was gradeschool too, first grade.
Anyways so yeah, other students would see me going into these counseling sessions, automatically I was deemed "crazy" by some of the other students. It took the other kids 5 years to get to know me to the point where they stopped.
Courts placed me with my mom right at the end of 5'th grade. New school, but now I had to start over in making freinds. Again because the courts placed me it sent up a red flag to the administration that I needed counseling. Difference was, now I was in junior high, whole new school without many freinds. Social structure in JH is a lot different than elementry, more about who you know and how you act/dress. I again had the label of "crazy" on me. Fourtunatly there was a group of non-mainstream people that let me into their social group. This provided me with the support I needed because all the social workers, psychiatrists, and school counselers were really bummin me out. If somebody tells you something for a long enough period of time, you start to belive it. All these "professionals" kept trying to convince me I needed to be put on lithium, and when I objected, would take offense to it and punish me by alienating me in school. One paticular thing I remember is the school principal coming into the woodshop class and instructing the teacher that I was crazy and not to let me use sharp/power tools in class because I might turn it on somebody.
This moniker of being crazy followed me all throughout my adolecent life, not because I did anything, but because my parents got divorced. Eventually when I got into HS I was instructed by the principal to drop out because of grades, then he added that the school didn't have the facilities to take care of a person with my special needs.
Screw them now, i'm 27, allmost making 6 figures as a system admin and living life on my own terms. I ended up here from solitararly playing around with computers till I understood them, they also served as a place to go back in the school days where nobody called me crazy.
I guess the point i'm trying to make here is this, you don't nessacarily have to be a geek, behave strangly, to be alienated in the school system. Things that are completely out of your control can occur that puts you on a pernament black list of counseling, forced medication, remidial special kids classes, and other harrassment techniques that i've seen the other kids post here. My case in point was a divorce. It makes me wonder how many other kids got the same treatment as myself.
--Toq
Consider yourself fortunate. You saw some measure of justice. Most geeks never do, which is where half of the bitterness comes from.
The Hellmouth series really has been a coup for Slashdot. The one thing geeks share in common more deeply than a love of technology is the feeling of being ostracized. The hellmouth series has given us all a place to share our pain. And more importantly, to wallow in self-pity. Everybody who has self-pity has a perverse desire to wallow in it for some reason. I don't know why, even though I'm just as big an offender as anyone. But regardless of the reason why I'm sure it has generated a lot of banner views for /. You can bet this isn't the last time we'll see the hellmouth posts here.
What really bugs me is the way we are unable to see our former oppressors as fellow human beings. I find the "laughing all the way to the bank" attitudes in many of these posts to be truely shallow (and I hope to join in RSN :/ ). Shallow in exactly the way we have accused others of being. The elitist "geeks are better than jocks" undertone that permeates the whole discussion is the worst of all, no matter how true it might be.
The way the formerly oppressed take on the views of their oppressors makes me wonder if the former oppressors were oppressed in the same way. That is, oppression is a recursive function. Maybe by their parents, maybe by the older kids when they were younger... I don't know. But they are human beings, and I can't believe that all of the cruelty that we have seen is truely intentional, just as we geeks don't really intend to be shallow and elitist.
We become what we hate, because we hate.
Well put. It makes me sad to see so many people who are stuck in the fight to gain power - regardless of what it is they are trying to gain power over.
I guess my personal experience made me realize that it isn't how others view you that matters, it's how you view yourself!
I grew up in a low-class area and went to an G1-8 elementry school where only 3 of the 30 odd people in our grade 8 class ended up going to post secondary institutions. Most of my friends in elementary school were poor and due to their environment (upbringing, role models, availability of good learning opportunities) they all ended up as cogs in the machine, one way or another. Suffice to say when we all went to high-school (G9-13) most of my old friends dropped out. It's not that they weren't intelligent, but I know there was a good fraction that got picked on like hell, whether they were the geeks or not, and this helped them on their decision to drop out and just get a job. I was at the bottom of the heap - it took me most of grades 1-8 to make my peers realize that I was just like them (being a nerd and all) and then when we got to high school it was like starting all over again. At first I floundered, trying to fade into the background via anonymity, but I quickly realized that if I wanted to be happy and appreciate myself I had to make a stance on being assimilated.
I think the best thing that happened to me in high school was that I continued doing something that I enjoyed a great deal - skateboarding. I also started high school right when skateboarding started to come back into popularity. My lucky break was that there were quite a few other kids who enjoyed skateboarding as well and we ended up hanging out together at school all the time. I never stopped hanging out with my geeky friends and still promoted my individuality though. Anyways, due to my allegience with the 'skater' crew I drew even more fire from the conformists (besides being low-income and nerdy) but at least I had friends that wouldn't ever back down from sticking up for what we believed in . The funny thing is that by the end of high school most of our previous aggressors came to the conclusion that we weren't that bad after all and eventually just left us be. I even like to think that my skater friends benifited academically from having me around as well, there's nothing like going over to your buddies house and his mom has a pic from the paper of you in it winning a math contest!
So in the end, I guess my recommendations are to never give up living for what you enjoy, no matter what. I enjoyed lots of different things and made friends right accross the board, and I think I've benifitted a great deal from it - all the while I've never forgotten to actively promote my individuality and to appreciate my sense of self. To restrict yourself to one particular type of group, whether it be jocks, preps, geeks, etc is closeminded and only helps to promote the conformists point of view.
UBU