I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
I remember lots of my classmates mocking my math teacher because of her accent, when I was a freshman. She was from Syria, in a mexican school. Little pieces of shit were always imitating her accent and mocking her from getting certain words wrong.
I saw her about four years later and she looked so tired of everything, less cheerful and with a tougher attitude from the beginning. Fortunately she still talks to me calmly and smiling, but it’s awful to know she’s always anxious around thw kids she teaches.
In seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Burns. It was only her third year of teaching, and it was her first year of teaching middle school. And the class I had her for?
My fellow classmates were fucking awful to Ms. Burns. They talked over her when she was trying to teach, they made fun of her appearance (said she looked like man and called her a ‘tranny’, or “It Burns” instead of Ms. Burns), and when a few months into the school year, she broke down and screamed at the top of her lungs at the class before sitting down at her desk and crying, they considered it a triumph and laughed about it for weeks.
Being a kid doesn’t exempt you from being a piece of shit, and just because, on the whole, adults have more power than minors doesn’t mean that minors get a free pass on being purposefully cruel to adults. Some of you on this website really need to learn this.
Not related to teaching (though that’s an excellent example of an environment in which abuse against both adults and minors occurs), but over the course of various therapy programs both online and offline, I have met adults – who shall remain anonymous, unless they ever want to come forward themselves – who have been violently sexually abused by minors, who have been otherwise physically assaulted by minors, and who have been (this one is especially common) emotionally/verbally abused by minors.
And these ones have been targeted because they are adults, and that made abusing them convenient, in many communities, to abuse. This was often because, when the adult spoke out, the minor in question could easily fall back on “I can’t abuse you, you’re an adult, and you suggesting that I could be abusive is abusive toward me.”
I feel like the main issue (and definitely the issue on this and other social media sites) is that people are conflating individual abuse with systemic injustice. You can be in a more socially privileged position than someone else and still be abused by them on a personal level. Kids and teens don’t systemically oppress adults, but that doesn’t mean they can’t abuse them in their daily, individual interactions with each other.
In other words, your abuser may often be less privileged than you are in various ways, but that still doesn’t negate that they’re an abuser.
I don’t know if you have considered this but stop smoking in areas where people are forced to wait at. Don’t smoke at crosswalks. Don’t smoke outside doorways. Don’t smoke at bus stops. People with asthma or other breathing conditions or people that idk DON’T WANT TO BREATHE IN YOUR CIGARETTE SMOKE are trying to get to places and need to be able to breathe. Stop smoking in crowded areas. stop smoking in crowded areas. STOP FORCING NONSMOKERS TO SECOND HAND SMOKE.
This may be news to some people, but this applies to marijuana too.
I’m allergic to tobacco and I had to spend all my savings on a mask to be able to walk down the street.
CONGRATULATIONS Democrats and Progressives. You won, and you won big. Do not allow any narrative other than one of a big successful fruition of hard-fought campaigns. Nationally, we won the House and netted at least seven governorships. We elected an unprecedented number of women. We made a statement in Trump’s ethno-racist America by electing two Muslim women. We turned at least 6 state legislatures blue. Three Red States demanded the Medicaid Expansion to Obamacare. Several states voted in favor of recreational marijuana and medical marijuana and an increased minimum wage. After our step backward with Donald Trump, we have taken many steps forward.
Our mainstream media continues to “group think” and work as a staged production. They decided that Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum, Beto O’Rourke, and Bill Nelson were the bellwether for Midterm 2018. We would have loved for every one of them to win. But in the grand scheme of things those were acceptable and probable losses. I live in Harris County Texas. While Beto O’Rourke lost our statewide race by a few percentage points, his energy activated our Latinos, Millennials, GenZs, and others for a clean sweep of virtually all positions of consequence in the county. These positions have a direct impact on every Harris County resident’s everyday life. As an example of our success in this very diverse county, the most powerful politician in Harris County is now Lina María Hidalgo, a woman, a Latina, an immigrant from Colombia who paid her dues with her grassroots service. (I’ve interviewed here several times (http://bit.ly/2yJ6drJ).
So, folks lets lift our heads. Let’s not succumb to a narrative that attenuates the sweetness of our success. We have activated populations that were either apathetic or thought they did not make a difference, or that no one cared about. Again, you won, and you won big. Now work to make it not only lasting but growing. Our work has just begun.
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