
A boy the bullies love to beat up - garbowza
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/24land.html
======
edw519
I read this story, too, wondering why it was here. But I kept reading anyway
because I had already noticed 18 comments and I was curious to see what my
fellow hackers had to say about this. (I'm a hacker news addict; I value your
comments as much as the original content.)

I expected my fellow hackers to condemn this bullying behavior and support the
bullyee. But instead I was very surprised (more like stunned) to read some of
these responses.

I empathized with the boy in the story because it could have been my story.
And probably the story of many people here. Just because you're not a jock or
a ladies man, then something must be wrong with you.

The attacks on this boy were unacceptable and inexcusable. I don't know the
answer to this problem, but blaming the victim is NOT.

~~~
qaexl
The funny thing about hackers is that they have the intellectual capability to
hack their own life, and rarely try.

Users who merely use a computer system don't get that feeling hackers get when
they are able to push into that creative realm, to shape and mold a system,
often ideas that had not been anywhere. It's that experience of bringing
something out of nothing, I think, is what makes coding so much fun. You get
to make choices when you code.

But just as you can make these choices when you code, you can do the same for
your life. Why else would people flock to Hacker News? Sure, it is about Paul
Graham's ideas on startups. I think, though, we flock here because we want to
take control of your financial situation.

What about your social life? What about that bully in high school ... or that
asshole boss of your's that keeps taking advantage of you?

In this civilized society, physical abuse is grounds for punishment by the
community. Verbal abuse leaves a lot of room to seriously damage someone
without leaving a mark. The question I have to ask is, are you going to depend
on the civilization's operating system, or are you going to use the skills
learned from hacking code to _really_ understand how the social OS works?

It may seem like blaming the "user", but you protect users from themselves
because they don't know how to hack. I too empathize with the boy, but I also
think he already has a lot of the tools he needs to get himself out.

~~~
edw519
Some of us just need a little more time than others. What concerns me most in
this case is whether so much damage has been done to cripple the boy for life.
Hard for us to imagine but still easy enough to happen.

~~~
qaexl
There are other societies who force this issue through a rite of passage.
Though that can be just as crippling.

I don't have to imagine the crippling effects of this. I've met a few people
whom I can see it happen. As for myself, though I've never been bullied to the
extent this kid has, I have had bad life strategies that took me years to
disassemble.

At the same time, some of the gifts I've been given are things that'd help
even with crippling damage. As cheesy as that sounds. And assuming I remember
if after suffering the damage.

Civilization is what lets people behave like ... people ... without going
around bashing each other on the head. Yet at the same time, you cannot let
the civilized abstractions separate you from your survival instincts. We are
not just the identity we form with other people; we are each in these fragile
sacks of water called the human body. I may try to increase the general level
of civilization to ensure the safety of the people, yet just as importantly,
I'll also try to pass on survival skills that I have learned. Including
surviving crippling damage.

------
Prrometheus
I agree that this is not Hacker News.

On the other hand, this relates to one of my pet causes. It is a shame that
the boy’s parents have no options except to A) petition the school board for
relief B) mount a political campaign to unseat the school board incumbents and
then reform the school system (a large undertaking) or C) move to another
school district. Why can’t they just take their money to a better run
competitor?

School choice doesn’t answer every school quality problem, but there is a
certain perverse anti-logic in bureaucratic monopolies that pervades much of
what goes on in primary education.

Hopefully my rising to the bait won’t pollute Hacker News discourse too much,
as only those who click on this comment thread will read my comment.

~~~
xlnt
D) Home School

~~~
Prrometheus
The problem with home schooling is that one cannot benefit from specialization
and the division of labor as one can in a school-institution. While the
average parent might be a better teacher than the average public school
employee, there are probably others out there who are even better teachers
than they.

Still, a step in the right direction.

~~~
sohail
We homeschool because our daughter does very well with it but if we could
afford a _good_ private school (I've been to bad ones), we would probably
consider it.

I once hired a private tutor to help me fill in some gaps (see lame private
school comment above!) After I had caught up (in a couple of months), we spent
about 95% of the time learning random things rather than anything I was doing
in univ (he hated computer science - not a real science he said!) I think he
enjoyed our sessions as much as I did. From time to time, he helped me on hard
problems I would do outside of the university curriculum but by and large we
were _just learning_. This is the way we run our homeschooling. Just learning.

Ah brings back memories. He used to complain about all the other students and
how they never do their work!

------
Tichy
Those not hacker news comments are so tiresome. I was curious about the
article, but it didn't seem to have a punchline. But then I was still curious
about the comments on Hacker News. After all, it seems to be a system with a
problem. Billy most definitely seems to not have managed to hack the system to
his advantage.

It seems unlikely that there could be a technological answer to those
problems, but who knows?

------
admoin
The consensus seems to be that this doesn't qualify as Hacker News, but I tend
to think that a large percentage of the users of this board can empathize with
this boy. I certainly went through some of this (though not nearly as much,
and at a much younger age), and I'm sure a pretty large percentage of today's
startup founders and programmers went through similar tormenting at some point
for being smart, different, or just unlucky. Thus, this gets a well deserved
up vote from me.

~~~
qaexl
Ender's Game.

~~~
xlnt
That's different: Ender won his fights.

~~~
qaexl
Ender didn't win all of his fights. He gets regularly beaten up by his older
brother.

Remember this? Ender didn't like how his bullies fought, strong versus weak.
He didn't like how he fought, smart versus stupid. And none of it worked with
his brother, who is just as smart and much more ruthless. Ender just wanted to
be left alone.

What about the Buggers? Weren't they bullying the humans? What happened later
when Ender found out the Buggers didn't even know they were killing sentient
beings? What was the human response? To get a bigger stick.

What are Billy's parents doing? They are doing what Ender realized couldn't
happen in Battle School. He couldn't go to the authorities. He had to finish
it on his own.

Why did Billy's sister stopped him from finishing the fight? To win, you have
to to win all the fights that come after -- that was what Ender saw. What
happened in the trial at the end of the book? Those kids had died. If Billy
did that, he would win that fight, and it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Instead
of a New York Times article about bullying, we'd have a media fest about
another Columbine.

Ender won almost all his fights, but it nearly destroyed him. To win, he had
to empathize with the enemy until he loved them. Then he annihilated them. He
kept seeing Peter's face in the mirror, until he realized his sister Valentine
was always with him. He beat the Giant who kept killing him with those
poisoned drinks ... by cheating. And that's when he came to the End of the
World.

My point with Ender's Game is not to say that Ender had the solution to this,
but rather that the book discussed all the issues people are bringing up here
in these comments. In detail. It is too bad it seems so few people have read
it or regarded my comment as pointless enough to downmod it. Too bad for them.

~~~
xlnt
I forgot about the fights with his brother. FWIW I upmodded you (a while ago,
before reading this).

~~~
qaexl
Neato, and thanks :-)

------
tsuru
> (not (hacker-news-p))

T

:(

~~~
bprater
Come on guys. You can get this news at Reddit. This isn't hacker news.

------
nazgulnarsil
I miss being a minor. I hung out with a lot of other nerdy kids, so it was
always fun to walk up behind a guy who was hassling one of my friends, tap him
on the shoulder, and punch him in the face.

------
mynameishere
Time for Catholic school, maybe.

At any rate, you will see this time and again in any institution that has an
internal disciplinary system. The effect is twofold:

1\. Small infractions are amplified in importance. Thus, it is possible to be
socially humiliated for...writing on a desk, talking out of line, chewing gum.

2\. Large infractions are covered up. Thus, beatings, which in the real world
could result in prison, are punished with 3 day suspensions.

Both of the above are designed to _preserve the power structure_. Minor
infractions are punished for the sake of exercising that power, reminding
people of it, to prevent cracks from forming, etc etc. Meanwhile, large
infractions are covered up so that the outside world doesn't realize that it
needs to intervene.

------
Hexstream
Bah, I've been a loser from ~7 to ~18 (I'm 22) and I see right through the BS.
I've been bullied repeatedly during that time. Fortunately it was "only" words
in my case but the ravages and dynamics are mostly the same, I think. Here are
some couple points, in random order:

\- Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy. He will _never_ get out
of this hell if he doesn't accept a big part of responsibility. There's a
reason he's the only one that gets beat so much and so hard. I'm sure his
mother is well-meaning, but she's not helping him by putting all the blame on
the other kids and the authorities which don't do squat. Which brings me to my
next point.

\- Trying to get Billy out of hell by counting on authorities or throwing
lawsuits is mostly pointless. The perpetrators are mostly untouchable and
they're fully aware of it. Those that push for the authorities to enforce
Billy's safety are only taking his destiny out of his hands and giving him a
good excuse to blame others for his predicament. "It's not my fault if I'm not
safe, it's the authorities that don't protect me enough". There will always be
waves and waves of people that will attack Billy, verbally or physically,
because guess what, there are tons of people in this world that are in dire
need of better status and self-esteem and a lot of them will opt to pray on
easy targets to make themselves feel superior.

\- I'm sure Billy thinks he can't reverse the tide because everyone knows him
and how he gets beat. But throw him in a new neighborhood where nobody knows
his past at all, and I'll bet you the same problem will occur. That's because
he's projecting a bloody image of himself that the sharks will no doubt sniff
real quick. When I was bullied, when people I had never even seen called me
names I thought the word somehow had got around. But what I should have
understood is that it's just the blood and shark thing. It's not that everyone
knows you, it's that everyone can picture you in the generic loser template.
Those days, I can recognize the "old me's" at a glance, and it's painfully
obvious I could become a bully if I hadn't matured properly.

\- Trying to find external motivations like "he's too tall" or "he wears
glasses" or "he has learning disabilities" is BS. When I was a loser, I was
indeed "too tall", and there always was "something wrong with me" (ex:
unfashionable clothes), but now I'm as tall as ever and I still have
unfashionable clothes but nobody notices that anymore. Weird, eh? No, it's
just my attitude that's changed.

~~~
zeantsoi
"Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy."

Do you have any unsubstantiated claims that DON'T come from "The Secret"?

~~~
Hexstream
I don't know what "The Secret" is, and that one certainly doesn't come from it
because it's my own. In any case I came up with this unsubstantiated claim on
my own (is it unsubstantiated if it stems from 12 years of first-hand
experience?)

~~~
dusklight
Can you elaborate a bit? What was the 50%, at least for you, that caused the
bullying?

~~~
Hexstream
k, first I'll admit that 78% of statistics are made on the spot ;P

But really, how can you explain that I had mostly the same attitude for 12
years and had the same problems and then I changed pretty fast and the
problems went away just as quickly? Coincidence?

If I only had 10% responsibility, seems to me I would have been mostly
powerless to change things. I don't think my neighborhood has gotten any more
or any less safer than it was. If it wasn't my environment that changed and it
wasn't me that did either, yet all the situation changed, how do you explain
that?

When I say it's his fault, it's not to put him down, it's to empower him.

~~~
qaexl
Were you empowered by someone else, or did you seize on this yourself?

In my (purely anecdotal) experience, telling someone they have a "choice", or
they can change things, ... it does not work very well. That experience of
knowing you can reach out and make a choice was something like becoming
enlightened. You get it or you don't.

~~~
Hexstream
That's the sad thing about it, there's stuff you can't just get told. I know
all the things my parents said to help, but it didn't really help at all when
they said it, it's just now that it's over that I get what they meant.

I guess you just have to reach a point where you're fed up enough that you
want to change for the best, whether it takes a year or 12 to reach _your_
bottom of the barrel.

edit: There's this guy on the street that told me to raise my head instead of
looking on the ground, and that kickstarted my process. I know it wouldn't
have worked if I hadn't been fed up with my current situation and didn't have
a clue I could do something about it. Like, if he had told me that 2 years
earlier it wouldn't have had any effect probably. But it's just to say, if
you're in deep trouble like Billy my hints might be worthless but for someone
farther along, "on the fence", it might help.

~~~
qaexl
So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point".

I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long
time. It was made worse because I was naturally able to get a lot of things
right, the first time. As things got more and more progressively difficult, I
couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to do.

I was helped though by a lot of fiction writers -- Heinlein, for one. I read
Ender's Game annually for a while. But it wasn't until reading Neal
Stephenson's Diamond Age that I got thinking I should start writing stuff, as
a way to try to pass on what I know now about taking initiative, personal
responsibility, etc. that on the off-chance that some teenager scraping the
bottom of the barrel gets a hold of my book, it just might be what catalyzes
this realization.

Diamond Age was about a primer given to three different girls; the primer was
built with nanotech, has a database full of old myths, folklore, and
teachings, has sensors to figure out what is going on around itself and the
girl that is bonded with it, and is able to generate stories based on what's
happening. It was that which lead me to my current studies into Joseph
Campbell's works on mythology and folklore. It's also why articles like this
has always interested me.

It's also why I like the whole concept of OLPC. I'd like to be able to write
something like that Primer, or at least a pale imitation of it.

It also helped that I trained in the martial arts that I did. Martial arts is
pretty much obsolete if you measure if by how well you can inflict violence. A
gun is a technology allowing someone to inflict more damage with less training
time. But as far as a life practice that keeps your ability to take initiative
sharp -- something Stephen Covey describes as "sharpening your saw" -- to push
past that, "I dun wanna" feeling, martial arts is better for that than a gun.

Since I think you understand this, I'm bringing this out here which I normally
wouldn't for Hacker News. There's a Japanese word meaning _budo_.
Transliterated, it means "way of war". I once heard someone explain it to
mean, "the art of living well under all circumstances while protecting your
interest." That is the context which I was reading the story with the
bullying.

The other is the Chinese word, _kungfu_. It's used in America to mean "martial
arts", but it's been mistranslated. ("Wushu" is what you want). _Kungfu_ means
refined skill accumulated over time, the integral of effort over time. One
teacher I met at a seminar once said, "I don't know why 'kung fu' is
translated as 'martial arts' when it really means patience."

~~~
Novash
I keep hearing people talk about this Ender's Game book. Should I buy one to
read? It's gonna be a hard endeavour since I will have to import it (can take
up to 2 months to arrive), so is it worthwhile?

~~~
qaexl
It was worth it to me. It's the kind of book you give to a kid who is too
brilliant than his own good: smarter than the teachers and authorities around
him yet still treated like a second-class citizen and never an adult. All of
my friends loved the book. You might be able to find an ebook of it lying
around somewhere -- check it out before you import it. You can also read the
first n-pages on Amazon.

------
daniel-cussen
I disagree with claims it's his fault.

------
Kaizyn
You would think that the parents would have enrolled the child in some sort of
self defense class or program. Teaching the kid how to defend himself from the
bullies would have been the most effective way to handle the situation.

------
sohail
Why are you modding up this article

------
lisper
Maybe time to add down-arrows.

~~~
far33d
I can't help but think, over and over again, that the "we need a down-arrow"
and "take it to reddit" comments are more polluting than the occasional non-
programming/startup related stories. The comments don't appear on the front
page, however, they do have a much lower information content.

This article and xkcd are both more informative than "time to add a down
arrow," no matter how much I may agree.

------
mattmaroon
It seems highly unlikely that this happened as randomly as the kids parents
seem to think. Kids are brutal, but they are also inconsistent. The fact that
they are all beating up on the same kid, day after day, means there is
something more to it than typical teenager douchebaggery.

Everyone thinks their child is sweet and innocent, but in reality the kids who
get beat up repeatedly are doing something to cause it. They may not deserve
the end result, but their actions do encourage it.

------
huherto
IMHO there is something wrong with the boy:

1.- Not being able to physically defend himself.

2.- Not being alert of his surroundings.

3.- Not being able to have friends who would look after him.

4.- Even having a behavior that exasperates other students.

I may even ask the question: What is he getting out of this? Is he getting
more attention? Is he getting to feel like a victim? Is he getting the right
to feel sorry about himself? Is he able to justify his low grades?

------
mooneater
Learn karate.

~~~
qaexl
That might not be a great idea, not because of the violence involved, but
because that twists the training. If the kid lucks out, he'd find a training
group willing to work out whatever it is that is attracting bullies to him. If
he doesn't luck out, he ends up being the guy getting beaten up in the dojo.

I actually know of a guy who didn't luck out. His father forced the guy to go
learn karate as a kid. Because he was getting picked on. His father yelled at
him when he sucked. I imagine his teachers then yelled at him too. The worst
part of it was that after he grew up, he is _still_ taking some form of
martial arts. He is _still_ getting picked on by his training group, even
though he switched to a different art, twice. He is so desperate for friends,
he whines about the verbal abuse of his current teacher yet refuses to quit
because the training group and the teacher are the only friends he has. These
are not the reasons to go learn a martial art.

That's not to say Karate won't work. The main thing is to get him around
people who act like _sane_ , socially-healthy adults -- people who takes
initiative in a civilized society yet have not lost touch with their survival
instincts. That may or may not be karate.

~~~
dfranke
It worked for me. I stopped getting bullied after a couple months of martial
arts, even though the closest I ever came during that time to getting into a
fight was one incident of locking a guy's arm behind his back and then letting
him go when he tried to shove me in the lunch line. Simply projecting greater
physical confidence was enough to make the bullies leave me alone.

------
tim2
Bad voters, bad.

------
xlnt
So when Billy says, "Mom, I don't want to go to school today. I fear I'll be
badly hurt," his parents make him go anyway?

Awful story :(

------
daniel-cussen
Reminds me of La Ciudad y los Perros (The Time of the Hero).

<http://www.enotes.com/time-hero/>

