Politics of bullying

Bullying represents the politics of conformity. The mechanism for coercion and control which enables power over someone, intertwined with other forms of oppression that include race, class, gender and sexuality. And it is reflected in all areas of life (and believe me, the Left isn’t immune to it either!) as it is about power and control.

They say school is the happiest days of your life. It was the most unhappiest times for me, unrelenting fucking misery. Reading this grim and tragic article today made me very sad and angry, what emanates from the piece is the teenager’s smile, hopeful.  How life can be one scary nightmare, unrelenting misery.

It reminded me of my own school days, pushed to the edge dangling over the precipice. I contemplated suicide like scores of young people. Like scores of kids and young people I tried to conform and be part of the in-crowd, yet I didn’t fit into their world. I didn’t look right, I was too fat (funny enough I starved myself when I was 13 to become that magical size 10… that was the popular size circa 1982 before Size Zero… but even then I wasn’t accepted into the in-crowd…and the jibes, put downs, and physical violence still continued).

It made me wonder what the hell was wrong me, there must be something wrong me….those thoughts constantly existed inside my head. I blamed myself for the bullying like countless other young people. And it didn’t help when my mum would say, ‘Why can’t you stick up for yourself’?…

And like most things in this fucked up alienated atomised dog-eat-dog wretched society it is easier to blame the victim, in whatever the situation, as a distraction. School bullying seemed to me a combination of that pack animal mentality, sniff out a victim, along with peer group pressure. I know some of the worst bullies were kids who were being bullied in their homes, therefore their way in dealing with that was to reclaim power by kicking someone more powerless than them.

I think I was only happy from 8 to 11 years old as I was taken out of a school riddled with vicious bullying. If I hadn’t been then my ‘sanity’ would certainly have disappeared into a void, I spent the latter days in that hypocritical and contradictory god fearing hell hole on antidepressants and sleeping tablets, sleep walking through my life while staring into space. Those childhood years highlighted obsessional compulsive behaviour (to give it a label), anxiety and depression.

Thankfully, I spent 3 years in a more inclusive and understanding school which brought me emotionally out of my wounded shell. But secondary school beckoned, by the time I was 14- 15 I decided to do ‘my own thing’, I was part of a group that eschewed the usual stuff we concentrated on academia, that was the focus, I was still a non-conformist existing on the margins with my odd tastes in music, clothes and political beliefs (I got the ‘fuck off back to the Soviet Union’ a few times but that made me laugh more than anything…and recently I got..’fuck off back to North Korea’ which also made me laugh as it gives a new twist…and spin!). I think I was seen as an eccentric, there was an uneasy truce, and I was left alone by the bullying in-crowd.

Naively, I believed things would be easier once I left school, thinking that people are more mature. Well, I was proved very wrong there. Again, I was seen as a weird eccentric where people thought they could dissect my life, create pathetic gossip about me. I didn’t conform to stereotypes, and a whispering campaign started about my sexuality culminating with some guy in one of my classes badgering me, shouting at me and goading me about my sexuality. That was soul destroying, the ritual of humiliation.

I stumbled out of the class room where I ended up in the toilet crying, desperate and despairing, the fog of depression sucking me in, slipping further into the abyss, wanting this to stop, wanting to find the exit. It felt never ending and never stopping. I wanted out of this shitty life along with the dehumanising cruelty. I just couldn’t  fight it anymore and the worst thing was feeling so alone. Loneliness is the killer.

I turned around and there was this young woman who had witnessed all this homophobic bullying shit happening, she hugged me. Her words were simple enough, ‘Don’t let them destroy you’….

Simple yet hard to put into practice. And today reading about this teenager made me remember all this, it brought it all back to me. How all life is so painfully fucking unbearably hard. Another lost life.

Cut galore……..just where will it end??!!!!

Talk about a feeding frenzy.

Not one of these schmucks wants to be left out of the competition known as Top Slasher. There’s a consensus in the establishment to smash the public sector, and one thing is that the public sector is the last bastion of trade unionism.

And gee, all of these  schmucks want to smash trade unionism into little pieces. Unfortunately, the trade union bureaucracy is not exactly organising a concerted fight back. So it is up to TU activists to organise the struggle (and as we have seen grass roots activists taking the lead).

Again , these cuts will have a severe impact on the working class. Rather than ridding us of that albatross known as Trident  they want to means test Child Benefit. Rather than withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and stopping these barbaric and illegal wars they want to make cuts in education with the phrase, ‘pay restraint’... Balls to that plan!

What about pay restraints for bankers. Oh but they got away with their bonuses murdering the financial system with their free market piracy while it is austerity for the public sector. We pay for the failure of neoliberalism. But when there’s a massive disorientating shock  to the economy our ruling elite see an opportunity to make sure that it is everyone else who will suffer the consequences when they push through what they have wanted for a long time. What they want of course is an all out attack on state provision for health, education and the benefit system.

The attack on the public sector will have a massive deflationary effect. 10% off public spending will account roughly to a  4% drop in demand. This is an attack on workers in the private sector as well.