The Unwanted Blog

I’m sure that by this point, everyone has seen the video of Casey Heynes laying a well-deserved beatdown on some little thug who was physically bullying him, so there’s no need to repeat it. Well, except for this *version* of the video:

[youtube 9GJMULsHHmc]

This, apparently, is the little twerp; who got himself bodyslammed:

I want to slam the kid against a wall just for looking like that.

The overwhelming response to the video, worldwide, has been essentially “way to go, Casey.” But I have seen a  few scattered references to “proportionality.” After all, the punches the little bastard was throwing at Casey were incredibly unlikely to cause serious physical damage, while being slammed into concrete head first could well have dain bramaged the little monster. But you know what? Screw proportional responses. Proportionality is all fine and dandy when you have the clear upper hand. If, say, Honduras were to send a few drunken soldiers to conquer the US, it would be a tad excessive to nuke the country off the map. But if you are a lone kid surrounded by bullies, you need to go way beyond proportional. You need to go to whatever lengths are required to bring the bullying to an end, and generally that means “overboard.”

In the novel “Ender’s Game,” the hero is a small boy named Ender. He is set upon by a bully. Ender is not your average kid (novels about average kids are *boring*), so he does the math. If he just fights back, he might win the day, but the bully and his buddies will be back. So, Ender doesn’t just fight back… he savages the bully. Once the bully is down… Ender proceeds to continue to kick him, as hard and as brutally as he can.

While fictional, the logic works. If you don’t fight back, you are an easy target for bullies. If you fight back and lose, you’ll just enrage them, and become a bigger target. However, if you destroy them, fill them with terror, they’re far more likely to leave you alone.

The US government has, coincidentally, decided that now is the time to waste a lot of effort and tax money on anti-bullying programs. Everything I’ve seen has suggested that they are going the touchy-feely route, with nonsensical “education” efforts. But what the should do is something quite different. Right now, if two kids are in a  fight, most schools will punish equally, even if one student was a bully and the other a victim. What the schools should instead do is treat the fighters appropriately. Bullies get official punishments. Victims do not. Victims who fight back get *rewards.* Victims who fight back in such a way that the bullies are either beaten into physical incapacity, or terrified into blithering babblehood, get even *more* rewards. Not just financial awards (scholarships and the like), but I think giving the victim some say in determining the future of the bully. At some level, giving the victim a vote on whether or not to expel, imprison, deport or catapult the bully would seem appropriate.

We pay soldiers to hurt people and break things. We pay people to lock other people into small steel and concrete cells. Society recognizes that sometimes it’s appropriate and necessary to ruin the hopes and dreams of certain individuals. Let’s recognize that this extends to physical bullies as well.