High school memories

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I think I'd better lay off the opinions I have about mental illness policy, before this debate pushes them towards the extreme. It's becoming much more controversial than I expected. Your viewpoints make a lot of sense Taza, and I can understand your outrage, and why you feel offended. Maybe my opinions are the result of too much contact, and too little understanding of mental illness.
I should also point out (voluntarily before another does) that I'm biased towards the mentally 'healthy' over the mentally ill. For me, injustices done by the mentally ill upon innocent people are more poignant than the opposite. For you this may be the other way around. I apologize if you felt discriminated.
My opinions haven't really changed, but I've learnt how offensive they can be. I'll be more considerate in the future.
I suggest it's best to return to the main topic of bullying.

 

Coin, I would seriously consider changing your opinions here. You're talking about killing people for something that, at best, they have little control over and, at worst, they have no control over. If a guy driving a car suddenly has a heart attack and the car careens into a busy market, killing someone, is the driver guilty of murder, or even manslaughter? He had no control. As to those that go off their meds, it is usually because the meds leave them living in a completely emotionless world with no joy whatsoever. Their lives are torture with the meds, yet they may just kill someone without the meds. The real torture is that they have no idea how likely they are to kill someone. True psychotics are just as likely to try having a picknick on the white house lawn with their imaginary friend Pixie as they are to kill someone.

The only case I would even consider executing the patient is that of Antisocial Personality Disorder. For those who don't know, psychopathy = sociopathy = Antisocial Personality Disorder. If you've ever seen the movie "The Good Son", that's this. These people have no conscience whatsoever. They see the people around them as nothing but tools for their own achievement and pleasure. Many of them can lead perfectly normal lives without any incidents other than hurt feelings, but many take a darker path and torture and kill to get what they want. More than a few serial killers have been this, though not hardly all. There is no treatment, there is no cure, there are no drugs. The real troubling part is, unless they are serial killers, a diagnosis doesn't mean squat as to whether or not they'll ever kill. You could execute a perfectly innocent man who just wanted to have sex with his wife and go to the movies from time to time.

Basically, Coin, you definitely need to learn more about the topic before you start talking about killing people. Learn what the conditions are, what the causes are, what treatments work, etc., even if only in brief.

 

Taza, I hear what you are saying about every living person having buttons. These days, if anyone pushes one of my well concealed ones they are usually quite shocked at the vitriol that can come out.

What I find bothersome, though, is the lame excuse factor or the "get out of jail free card" factor that sometimes comes into mental illness issues. Once someome has tied up, raped, and killed another human being, I am 100% not interested in hearing how they had no control over it. Whether it's true or not makes no difference to me. Such behaviours are not the same as NOGs example of a heart attack victim losing control over his car. Going back to my example, at that point I primarily want public safety to trump the rights of the perpetrator regardless of his mental state and secondarily I want some retribution, and a real, good hard look at if he really couldn't control himself. I don't want him on the street 5 months later mouthing platitudes to the victim's loved ones and laughing up his sleeve at his cleverness in screwing the system.

Going back to bullying, though, I should say that I never was bullied much in high school -- we have streaming and most of my worst enemies form junior high were in other courses and out of my hair. But the clique division at my school was fierce and I lived like a mole, knowing that if I stuck my head up and drew the attention of the popular crowd I'd be smashed solidly. I didn't like that very much. Fortunately I had about 3 distinct circles of friends and a decent home life so things weren't too bad. But they coulda been better.

 

For those of you that aren't aware of this, psych wards are not fun places to be, and the meds they make you take are usually not fun meds to take. I won't say it's worse than prison, or even as bad, but it's definitely not a vacation at Disney Land.

 

coin:

So you are against the insane being institutionalised against their will, placed in restraints, forcibly medicated, and granting power of attorney to someone they don't want controlling their finances? I mean, ****, you said you wanted the crazies to have the same rights you do.

I had a much longer post written out previously, but lost it. So, in a nutshell: To even imply that society gives the mentally ill a good deal is absolute horse ****. I guess it could be different in your area of the world, but in Australia the committed have fewer rights than the worst 'sane' prisoners, and being stigmatised as 'mentally ill' is like a life-long curse. Things are slowly getting better, with the government starting to push the message that the mentally ill aren't to be held in contempt, but to be supported and given the opportunity to live a normal life.

As to your observation that it's 'unfair' that juveniles and the mentally ill aren't treated like reasonable adults in a court of law, there is a good reason why this is so. And that reason is: Because they aren't reasonable adults.

 

My high-school memories, or the memories concerning that time-frame, mainly consist of me slacking.

Can't really say that I'd ever been bullied. Sure there were the tough guys, a buch of bona-fide losers who nowadays spend their time delving deeper into the realm of alcoholism and drug abuse, in a not we're having a-good-time-yay! sort of way, but in a spending the most of the rest of their lives in jail or like in most cases, beating up their girlfriends into coma and sinking deeper into the fascinating philosophy of coach-potatoism.

I have to admit, there were few occasions they had a go and try to get me over the edge, but it wasn't bullying. It's not semantics. They had leraned very early on that I wasn't a pushover. So for me the high-school time was easy as pumpking pie. Oh sure, well, heh, the baddies in my class used to have huge grudges since I roughed them up a couple of times when they had started bullying someone who was smaller than them. This was before high-school age, though. But as it was relatively long time ago, my berserk rage when I fought at least gave me the added bonus that I was considered quite strong. Well...or danegrous enough. Might be that kicking someone in the gut while wearing ice-skates for stealing my hat might give the message not to mess with me if you don't want to get messed up. This helped a ton with those guys when we were high-school age. Then it was so easy that I didn't even have to do anything but stare them down if they tried to get too funny.

I never had to worry about the consequences. There were none. I wasn't that dangerous, just a few bloodied noses and bruises to those who had it coming, and I guess the teachers saw that the guys I roughed up had it coming. On the other hand getting the rep of a psycho doesn't exactly improve your social life, but it didn't hinder it that much either. As I can't say that I had the priviledge, at least I had the option to choose the crew I liked to hang out with. Had a moment when I used to hang out with the bullies, but I chose not to and went with the guys who had computers.

We had a band with my friends when we were high-school age, I was the drummer, even if I wasn't any good at it. I never put any effort into anything. Never did my homework. Not ever. Didn't have to. Didn't get me any good grades though, except in few subjects, but I failed only a couple of courses in maths. Usually you can't be any good in maths if you don't do any maths, so there you go. My buddies were p.o'd about me slacking off since they sweated for their grades and I got the same grades as they did without any effort whatsoever.

Otherwise I was pretty obnoxious little perv, obnoxious otherwise, in a lazy slacking kind of way, annoying as hell, but didn't make much trouble. The school principle and a couple of teachers once contacted my mom about me being an under-achiever but that was basically that. Well, I used to do a harmless little bit of arson (once) - no property was damaged - and larceny (a little bit of shoplifting for some booze and cigarettes). Then later on when it finally dawned on me that I can't get anywhere with my grades from that high-school I quit, got a job and when I turned 18 I basically went the whole thing over in an adult education high-school.

 

Meh, I hated high school. I wasnt popular, I wasnt in the "in" crowd. I think I was a fairly..... strange and weird kid, because I matured slower than my peers, emotionally. So, I was behind in the girl front, only having my first kiss at 16.

I wasnt bullied (probably because I was nearly 6 foot when I was 14 I think), but I was teased by some people. I had (still have) a stutter, and as I said I could be kinda awkward, back in those days. I gained respect later in high school (I wasnt that awkward... I mean I'm a nice guy, but not Mr Popular), but I was never in or popular. It didnt help that my Dad died when I was 15. That made me suffer from quite bad depression for a few years.

Luckily I never struggled with academics though. I never worked hard at all, and ended being top of my year in matric (South African final year). My best friend in high school wasnt in the same school as me, but we lived in the same town. We are still best friends. We often played network games together, sometime together with some friends from my high school.

I dont have fond memories of high school, I preferred university. My depression continued in university right until my final year, then I finally started regularly seeing a psychologist for cognitive behavioural therapy, and she eventually convinced me to try anti depressants, which helped (well, that and teaching me to better recognize what the cause of my moods and feelings was).

 

You know, I've seen this several times during my career as a teacher. I saw a bit of it during my time as a kid. It's crap like this that gets me totally furious. I don't think the author of this piece is trying to defend the bully, but there's plenty of bleeding heart liberals who do -- they make excuse after excuse for these rotten little pieces of crap, totally and completely disregarding the damage done to the victims.

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If half of what that kid says is serious (which near the end I began to suspect some of it was), then this may actually come out well. Comparatively, Lindsay got off light (girls usually do when it's other girls antagonizing them, compared to boys antagonizing anyone), and Sara may actually have a chance to recognize her problems and confront them before she really does turn into one of those other juvy girls. I'm afraid, however, that all this stuff is really just sliding past Sara, and she's just learning the lingo to get people to pity her.

I think there's some truth to both of these, but the fact that, to me at least, she seems to have just thrown these out, and both in quick succession (one sentence), tells me she was basically fed those excuses, be it from her father, a lawyer, a councelor/psychologist, or even just from TV. It doesn't sound like she thought about things and got any introspection from it.

I'd say stick her in with the other youth offenders for a week or so, sort of a more serious 'scared straight', then demand counceling afterward. She needs the first because without it she likely won't really want to change, so even the best counceling won't do anything.

Well, that's my anyway.

 

In highschool, I learnt life wasn't fair. And you had to deal with it. I participated in a homework-sharing scheme, of which I'm not exactly proud today, but in the light of the past circumstances, I can say I'm not sure the amount of homework was physically doable in the amount of time between leaving school for home and leaving home for school minus sleeping, and I wasn't going to give up all my free time. I also had periodical beef with some teachers and I wasn't letting any of them get away with anything. I was blunt at times. At the same time, I was consider the guy you went to when you wanted to talk to someone you didn't want to talk to. This included teachers asking me. In the end, I carried enough weight to sway things and I made a memorable presence. The headmaster sunk my grade in his subject (maths) to near-fail, even though with the previous teacher it'd have been a B and I got the highest trial final exam grade in my class. I had to give up trying to fight for a C because the D he gave me could sink to E, meaning fail. I got the second highest final exam GPA (my course GPA was perhaps 10% above straight B, maybe better, but the exam GPA was 33% above straight A) - only because some guy had papers from high-profile contests allowing him to take max grades in everything (which he duly deserved but it displaced me as the lead). So the headmaster had to give me my certificate and all such out there in public in the middle of the sports hall, like to the rest of the top 10 people. Yi-haaa, I got my own!

I would also pull off stuff like having several people assist me for 2 weeks with a relatively simple task, skipping classes to do it. That they later complained about me chatting while they were "working", made me have to remind them 1) I started the whole thing, 2) I got them where they were, 3) I still did most of the job, 4) I could have done it all on my own, 5) I was the boss anyway. I think I won, but it wasn't too clear. We got along anyway and we're friends. It doesn't matter.

Also, some people who started as enemies became friends, including the best friends kind of, even with some romantic interest. Oh well, that's how life goes.

Fights were scarce. I never got beaten, although I did lose some arm-wrestling or some other playfull stuff. I never, however, got beaten in a serious context. I'd jump on desks or windows if I needed to. And I once held someone upside down by his ankles. But overall I was a clumsy bear that got doctor's leave for P.E. except the one day the P.E. teacher caught me without doctor's leave and I had to squeeze my guts out of me doing chin-ups on a ladder up on the wall for the whole class. I did and told him innocently I was probably losing my form because it slightly tired me, which was probably due to lack of practice.

Some of those highschool moments do feel like they were yesterday. Sometimes I feel like I was 18 yesterday.

Those were good years. I had a lot of energy and flair and probably a bigger Charisma score than these days. Or who knows.

We were close with the classmates. There was heavy drinking and heavy dancing - well, we were Polish. We could drink a lot without passing out. Sometimes we drunk too much, for which I'm regretful, but much of the time we simply had good fun with a lot of youthful exaggeration.

Can we narrate highschool experience without touching on romance? That'd be a boring module... er... I mean, story. Nah, kidding. I firmly believe the purpose of romance is finding someone to share a life with, forsaking all others, and I generally believed the same back then (about relationships, though maybe not about strictly everything that was there in the romance department) but this doesn't mean my classmates and others weren't fabulous girls. Falls under friendship, though, even where vested romantic interest was involved.

People have changed. There's little contact these days. They're still the same people, we're still young, but they have changed and are not the same they were. I probably have changed as well, although some say I have not changed at all. That may be true. I've always been a bit of a guardian of the past and the past seems to live in me.

O kosmos kallos esti kai o demiourgos agathos... Yeah, I did have Greek in school. And Latin. And French. Long live that den of injustice!