Why so angry, Piggy?

Because these fuckers want to kill me, Ralph.

This from the Sun Times got me to thinking about things.

Teens caught in bullies' Web

June 28, 2007
BY ART GOLAB AND BARRETT NEWELL Staff Reporters

It's a lot easier than tripping someone in the school hallway or shoving them on the playground. Nowadays, all it takes to be a bully is a keyboard, computer and Internet hookup, according to a new study.

Nearly one in three teenagers who use the Internet say they have been harassed online, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The harassment ranged from e-mailed threats of violence and mere name-calling to the spreading of nasty rumors and posting of embarrassing pictures.

"In some cases what we heard was that adolescent cruelty had simply moved from the school yard, the locker room, the bathroom wall and the phone onto the Internet," study author Amanda Lenhart wrote.

It's happened to Joe Carlos, 19, of Chicago.

"I was talking to a friend [online, on MySpace] and her boyfriend had her password to her MySpace account" and eavesdropped on the exchange, Carlos said.

So the boyfriend e-mailed him a message from the girl's account, stating: "Stop talking to my girlfriend or I'll kick your ass," Carlos said.

Online bullying is even more attractive to bullies because they can do it secretly. "It's easier to have muscles online," said Carlos, a Northern Illinois University student.

And bullying on the Net can cause even more damage than old-style bullying.

Teen girls targeted more

"I think there's a greater potential for emotional harm from cyberbullying because it occurs 24-7 and the audience is much wider," said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Oregon-based Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use.

"Online communications tend to be even more vicious and uncontrolled, and it's all occurring outside the view of adults," said Willard, author of the book Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats.

Willard has heard reports of students so traumatized by what has been posted about them online that "they are unwilling or unable to go to school.
…

My heart goes all the way out to these kids.

And I am reminded that, in the meat world, everyone has been bullied, which is why the inadequacy of the available vocabulary for describing bullying has always irritated me.

Because it’s like having only one word to describe every variety of fissure, from potholes to Grand Canyons.

The bully, everyone knows, is the big, looming kid. The one with the moustache in seventh grade. A little fat. A little dim.

The one who beats you up and takes your lunch money.

The one on whom you will someday nobly land a hay-maker and who will then magically respect you: Like Arthur drawing the sword form the stone, this act of strength and purity will change your life all around. Or your tormentor will wander away and find someone else after a week or a month or a semester.

Everybody knows that guy.

I’m not talking about that guy.

Because I’m not talking about being bullied. Instead I’m talking a little bit about being terrorized, and the distinction bewteen the two. Because while everyone has been bullied, not everyone has been terrorized.

And because not everyone has been terrorized, conflating the two makes discussion difficult, because if you have never been terrorized it might be hard for you to understand how kids can snap. Go mad. Implode. Explode.

“Jeez,” you might reasonably ask. “I mean, doesn’t everyone get picked on?”

No. Not this way. Because if you have been terrorized, you know have been marked. Marked forever and to the bone, and your experience is, in some very distinctive ways, forever beyond the understanding of those who were merely bullied.

Bullied means you were picked on for weeks or months; terrorized means you were painted with an indelible target and the harassment continues for years.

Bullied means, if you fight back, you can sometimes win, or at least lose with your dignity intact; terrorized means it is made intimately clear to you tat you will never, ever be allowed to win. That if it ever even looks like you’re going to win, your tormenters will just pile on more bodies and draw more blood.

And if anyone stands with you, they’ll end up in the ER too.

Bullied means there are limits; terrorized means you are a walking free-fire zone. You can be stabbed. Rammed into walls head-first. Thrown down stairwells.

Bullied means you can still dream of being cool. Of being on the inside. Of being invited to join. Terrorized means never dreaming of being cool because, being a kid, terrorized feels like forever. Being a kid, you can’t change schools or neighborhoods or families or faces. Being a kid means making up every single day knowing that terrorized waits patiently for you in the morning on the way to school. Terrorized follows you home and beats you bloody in your own back yard. Terrorized whips the crap out of you in-class. In the halls. In the bathroom.

Terrorized means the lesson is driven home with fists and tears every day that you will never be allowed to escape, and you will never be allowed to win. Terrorized means that when you dream of the best thing in the world, you dream of being far away, or grown up, or watching your tormenters die.

Bullied means Dad or Teacher or the Principal or the Priest can offer you useful advice or intercession; terrorized means you learn far too young that adults are often weak or ineffectual of liars.

Terrorized means sitting in your tie and shirt-sleeves in Sunday School, listening to sermons about the Prince of Peace and being kind and forgiving, alongside of people who will pound you into the ground like a tent spike the minute you get outside.

Terrorized means while he or she empathizes, the Teacher is very, very busy and there are so many rules, and they really can’t do a fucking thing.

Terrorized means watching the Principal pin ribbons on the some of the people who just ripped your shirt off and flushed it down the toilet.

Terrorized means discovering to your astonishment that the parents of your tormenters actually teach their little raptors to be brutal pricks and reward them when they're especially good at it.

Terrorized means learning far too early that the System will not defend you if you are an Outsider. That the Large Print Regulations and Commandments that are supposed to protect you always come with tricksy Fine Print that somehow always ends up meaning– so sorry – nothing can be done.

Terrorized means learning bruise-by-bruise that there is a world-full of secret, unwritten rules that protect the same people that the sermons and civics classes condemn.

Terrorized you suddenly discover have been force-marched into a different, alien country, and abandoned there.

And if that hasn’t happened to you, you probably don’t understand it. Because like any other experiential lesson, you have to go through it to get it, and because – if you are very lucky -- Terrorized means you develop some skills.

One such is a kind of Third Eye.

The Eye of the Outsider.

The capacity to fire hard-x-rays right on through the bullshit and see the truth of things.

Another gift the Terrorized are bequeathed -- unless we become monsters and spend the rest of our three score and ten looking for blood and revenge – is compassion and a fierce appetite for justice with a side of mercy.

A need that we can feel itching in our childhood scars, to create and sustain a way of life that protects the least of us and levels the playing fields for all of us. We are instantly drawn to other groups that have been first savaged, and then laughingly dismissed by the majority culture. Those who have also been fucked over and then are told to shut up and live with it. Who have learned the hard way that trying to redeem promises of evenhandedness and community often only invites more terrible retribution.

And lastly, if you come through the fire mostly human, you emerge with a ferocious hatred of Terrorizers of all kinds. Thugs. Liars. The kind of creeps and moral imbeciles who make their bones hating the poor, the weak, the uppity, the gay and the brown, while hiding out behind Jesus Christ. The kind of bestial degenerates who start wars, then lie about it, then hide behind dead soldiers, smirking, calling their critics weak and unpatriotic.

Subhuman rodents like Ann Coulter who’s idea of “debate” is to call a man a “fag” while giggling. To loudly suggest that this decent man is trying to make hay from his dead child, and that the world would be better off if he died in a terrorist attack.

Who responded to a very, very polite request to stop her berserk, vicious, personal attacks…with more personal attacks.

She is a raving, gibbering thing that only no longer bears even a glancing resemblance to a member of the human species (one can only speculate what species of brain-rotting ubersyphilis one can contract when you make your buck servicing the gnarled johnsons of a thousand lower demons) She (and anyone who stand with her or puts her in front of a camera without a ball gag in her mouth and the word “Lying Slunkmeat Crack Dumpster” tattooed on her forehead) has earned nothing but the loud and sustain contempt of all real Americans.

We are not amused or dismissive of such creatures. We are repulsed by them and all they stand for, because we recognize them for who and what they are. Because if you survive with your heart intact, you can smell the beast when it enters the room. Even in the dark.

And you rise up.

Or, as Hemingway put it more eloquently than any of us: ““The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

It is hard way to learn. “I curse the lesson but \bless the knowledge”, as the saying goes,

Because as a kid, being small and scrawny and living at the mercy of a phalanx mini-Coulters is an awful box to be in, and seems like a night that will never end.

And in some ways it never does.