I don't know. I suppose I'm strange in the sense that I've never felt that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" was ever a good way to deal with childhood bullying or trauma. Much in the same way that parents will typically tell their kids "ehhh, don't worry about it you'll never see them again after high school." I think most adults seriously forget the pain kids are actually going through. Chalking it up to a natural consequence of poor impulse control does nothing to help the victims of it. We're trying to raise children to be adults, not children, and adults engage in bullying and poor impulse control too. Sending a message that being an exclusionary asshole is not okay is okay imo.

I can deal with people telling me to fuck off at work. But I don't think I acquired that skill from being made antifragile through exposure to verbal taunts. I got those skills from developing myself intellectually, socially, as a result of the love and input of others. I don't think martial arts would have helped. In my experience kids who are told to toughen up learn to repress their feelings and develop more issues as a result. Problems you and I would brush off as meaningless can genuinely drive kids and teens to the point of suicide. How does the learning process continue if you're dead? The article posts a link to a definition of bullying they consider to be too broad.

An Imbalance of Power: Kids who bully use their power—such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to control or harm others. Power imbalances can

change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people.

Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more

than once.

It's not that crazy. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Social structures in elementary/high school make no sense. And kids have no frame of reference. The reason adults say "wait until you're older" is because they have that frame, the realization that most of those kids are only winning because the game is rigged. Is that 250-lb football dick who used to taunt me in math class going to produce the grand unified theory anytime soon? No. But in the heat of the moment, no, they're on the top of the social ladder, have their shit together!, and are perpetuating a hierarchy that's preventing you from forming meaningful relationships, getting laid, getting high in peace, rocking out, whatever. Kids have an intense need to feel belonging, to feel accepted, and completing opting out of the social life in the only area they can have one doesn't really work.

I got bullied mad in high school. It affected me greatly. No it wasn't "the threat of physical violence". The way I tried to deal with it at the time was to go full Buddhist and send them loving-kindness. It kind of worked. But really I regret repressing my emotions. I don't know how free range kids is exactly connected to bullying. Sure, schools may be overzealous with zero tolerance policies, but telling the teacher doesn't work at 16. Hanging out outside of school is basically regulated by parents. My parents couldn't give a Craig Toronto Fuck what I was doing outside. I'd come home at 7am hallucinating and breakfast was ready.

Grade 11. I was in law class with an ex-military history teacher who used to routinely make fun of all the kids in his class. I have never met someone with a bigger ego in my life. This guy was the epitome of the macho-male bullshit jock mentality keeping the entire planet Earth in the fucking bayou. One day I was late for class and he thought it would be funny to lock me outside the classroom and spent 10 minutes asking the entire class if I was a zombie or a werewolf. Hilarious. I didn't look goth at all. I had sort of long hair and a tiny ass hoodie. That experience broke my teenage soul, made me alienated as heck, and was one of the contributing factors to nearly downing 110 valiums when I was 17. As an adult I could have brushed if off thinking "yeah, this guy is a loser, I know calculus", but it's not the same when you're 17 and your social experience is limited to your high school, being madly in love with the girl sitting in front of you and the 20-something legends at your pizza joint.

The only way to make kids antifragile is to send them unconditional love. Forever.

Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids outlines how we got here, chapter and verse. Fundamentally, Jon Walsh, America's Most Wanted and an industry of Sunday night made-for-TV movies fueled a thirst for "child in peril" narratives at exactly the time the Fairness Doctrine was struck down. News ceased to be about what journalists thought the public should see and became what journalists could get advertisers to pay for. Into that abyss throw CNN - nobody watches Baby Jessica for a day and a half straight without this witches' brew in place.

Bullying, however, is another thing. I think you had to be there. Because throughout the '80s... well, hang on a sec and give me a few minutes of your time.

The social outsider paradigm from the end of the Weather Underground was "weak outcasts to be mocked." Sure, we had mass shootings but generally, it was white men losing their shit and slaughtering kids. I mean, Stephen King wrote a novel in which the school shooter is the protagonist. Car wars, a game that celebrates road rage, had a module in which you drive your car into a mall and kill as many shoppers as possible. This was all light-hearted fun until Kip Kinkel.

It was gonna happen somewhere. The jocks TP'd and shoe polished all the nerd cars in '92, except my buddy Bob, who had an AR-15 and an M1 Springfield in his gun rack. Another guy I knew got to beat his girlfriend in public view before class without so much as a protection order. The administration even knew he brought a Luger to school. It took him telling a friend of mine "I'm going to kill her today" to get him expelled - not charged with anything, mind you, but expelled. Social dynamics got tense enough that one side was celebrated for victimizing the other while the other side marinated in a culture of imaginary vengeance. The hardware's there. All it takes is the belief you have nothing to lose.

I doubt Kip Kinkel was the first nerd to snap, write a manifesto, murder his parents, haul a bunch of guns to school and spray it down but he was the first one to merit 24-7 news coverage. So far as I know, he was the last to scream "I'm sorry" as he did it. And maybe there was a poignancy there that tasted delicious to CNN. Maybe it was that he shot at so many people (he killed only two kids but he wounded 25). Whatever it was, "nerds" weren't people you stuffed into lockers anymore. They were the ones who might snap and kill the people you really cared about. It's worth watching that Frontline because it perfectly encapsulates the "someone think of the children" mentality that took over in that brief shining moment before April 20 1999.

Nobody remembers Kip Kinkel anymore. That's because Columbine was nine months later and a lot more cut and dried. Social loners. Art kids. "Trenchcoat mafia." Sociopaths. Gun shows. Video of shooting practice. Kip Kinkel didn't leave nearly the footage of Klebold and Harris so they became the face of it. Taunt a nerd, launch a death squad. Taunt a nerd, get a Myspace suicide. And since we can't do anything about the guns (OBVIOUSLY) and since we can't do anything about Myspace (OBVIOUSLY) what we can do is clutch pearls, wring hands and declare war on "bullies" who - more often than not, remain the social outcasts, the ones who don't have six friends to back up their story, the ones who aren't completely plugged into the varsity sports network.

On the one hand, the schools do duck'n'cover drills because they're more likely to be murdered by a classmate than anything this side of a car crash. On the other hand, be sure to cast out The Others as fast as you can because if we're all in the same clique we're a lot less likely to shoot each other up, right?

Martial arts is useful because it teaches discipline and gives kids something to do. I did tae kwon do; I wasn't about to do football. Martial arts is unhelpful because only nerds do martial arts. You can train twice a week to throw and pin someone in a gi but doesn't take more than a couple Youtube videos to figure out how to kill someone with a .45.

It's never been about bullying. Not really. It's always been about how to keep the outcasts down. Charles Atlas will help you not be the 90lb weaking with sand kicked in his face but Taxi Driver was 40 years ago and in lieu of making it harder to kill people, we're trying to make it easier to cast out the people we might drive to kill.

It's a worthwhile discussion to have? And I celebrate a dojo figuring it out? Even if they're using frickin' Taleb terminology to do it, I celebrate it. But "bully" is just another way of saying "burn the witch" and I don't know that we can really do much about it without some deep societal change.

The Zero Tolerance Generation (pdf)