Social media has added a whole new dimension to bullying. Back in my day, switching schools allowed one to get a "fresh start" so to speak. But now, it doesn't matter what school you transfer to. Your new classmates will pull your profile on social media and see that you were tagged a "loser" from the school you came from, making it very difficult for you to start all over again.
As another poster here pointed out, social media is utterly poison. This is why our younger people are so indoctrinated. In order to stay in the "cool club", they have to fill their social media timelines with all kinds of woke nonsense. Lest they get "cancelled."
I agree. Much of technology today is poison to young kids.
And I am not saying I would have been different. I would have been even more into it. I thank God they didn’t have video games when I was a kid, because I would have been immersed in it.
My brothers and I ran into a few bullies in school. We were told to take our part and stand our ground. The thugs would sometimes run in packs and Dad taught us if they gang up on you let them know you would hunt them down one at a time and knock their teeth out if they chose to do the pack attack. His other advice, inflict as much pain and damage as you can in a gang fight and fight as dirty as you have too since they chose to fight dirty.
All of our fights with bullies were one on one except for two. The neighborhood bully who I had thumped twice already and was my age decided to attack a younger and smaller brother of mine on the playground. When I confronted him after school he picked up a huge board and went after the same little brother who was standing there at the confrontation. When he picked up the board me and another brother bum rushed him and thumped him, he never bothered us again after getting a broke nose. His cousin stood there with him wailing for help and we essentially told him, come on lets go. He declined.
The other time my brother and a black guy who wasn’t from the area, he moved to the KY mountains from the big city of Louisville and had a mouth on him that ran like a machine gun. All the kids, including the other blacks hated this guy. Him and my brother were on a field trip and said black guy decided to pick on my brother and my brother picked back and ground up a candy bar in the dudes afro which brought threats of retaliation at school tomorrow.
Me, my brother and the black dude were all in the same history class and before class with the teacher out of the classroom the mouthing started and eventually the black guy threw a punch on my brother and off they went. I watched, it wasn’t my fight. Dude had my brother in a headlock for a long time and he was about to break free of the headlock and the black dude started hollering for others to grab my brother to which I stood up and said that ain’t happening, we clear and they stood down. At which point my brother broke free and received a swift kick in the balls by the black dude which with the adrenalin he didn’t react but did throw a left cross and an upper cut that connected and sent the black reeling and staggering backward and then he caught two more right crosses and was about to hit the floor and the teacher walked in. For their trouble they got 5 licks with a paddle from the asst. principal and my brother got the nickname Iron Balls.
Victim-blaming garbage.
“Bullying was pretty bad when I went to public school back in the 1970s. Back in those days, kids were coached by their Dads to “punch back hard” on bullies but unfortunately, that solution rarely worked. ...”
Plus if a kid physically fights back with a bully today both get suspended. Usually the the parents of the kid being bullied will be up at that school house, with a lawyer demanding he not be suspended and it gets over turned. But only if the parents bring in a lawyer.
This is why we have a lot of school shootings as a lot of those kids were bullied.
Before WW 2, my dad was a German fluent, English speaker in Norwegian ND/Minnesota. One day after school a few boys tied him to a tree and beat him with a whip for being a Kraut.
My Dad paid them back, then took off for CA riding the rails to the recruiting office.