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.
10 Responses to “Casey’s Game”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Hear, hear.
Jim
i thought that really sucked was the fact that I forgot what state but it was on YouTube is the fact that there was a case of a 20 year old girl facing
life in jail because at 16 she killed her father because he was raping her..
I feel that the victim sometimes suffers more than the perpetrator…
somehow we should refine our so called system of justice..personally
I hope she gets an appeal.
You know whats sad? I heard at first the school was going to suspend Casey for that and let the little bastard that was bullying him off scot free. Shit needs to stop. When I’m older i am going to teach my kids to ignore it, report it, but after a while if it keeps going on, enough is enough. I back Casey and screw the other kid and his, “he punched me first” excuse. He is only saying that so that he gets a little sympathy for what happened. If he was truly feeling the way he was when I saw his interview couple of hours before, he would have come forward with that info straight up. I back you Casey, for what it’s worth, even if you cant do it at all cause you don’t know who i am, call me up, i got a few mates who would help me watch your back if he and his mates tried any thing else. hell, cant even remember the little monsters name.
Hmm, remember the lines:
” Gee, he didn’t hurt you that bad, why did you have to have him expelled?”
Or my personal favorite :
“we didn’t pick on them that much more this year than last year.” (Columbine)
Ignorant primate interaction is a very strange thing. I do not have the answer.
-G.
I’ve encountered two incidences of bullying that were solved by use of “excessive” force. In one case, no one seems to have discovered what happened, but one was very public.
One was a girl who harassed my daughter for a year before deciding to fight my daughter. My little girl smashed the obnoxious bitch and the principal tried to get me to agree to hang my daughter. I refused. The attacker was suspended for a while.
The other was mine. One of the tough guys in middle school decided he’d harass me every day after school. I complained but because no one in authority could see it happening there was no action. So on the last day of middle school I got the place he usually found me before he did. When he came around the corner I hit the little turd with a large tree branch. If he’d gotten up I’d have hit him again. I have no idea what happened to him after that. For years I thought I might have killed him because he didn’t appear in high school.
Sometimes you gotta do it so it works for you. Most bullies don’t listen to reason.
Dude, this article of your’s probably just caused a dozen liberal readers to wet their pants. Reward someone for fighting back? The horror! 😉
Proportional response is properly measured not against the unacceptable actions of the aggressor, but against what is needed to stop the threat.
Sometimes teaching them how to live in a civilized manner means one has to to introduce the concept of personal destruction to children, puppies, and psychopaths. Fear works on those who refuse to engage their intellect.
Love this video.
You know how every once in a while you run across a kid and you say to yourself, “A good slapping would do that kid a world of good”? That’s what I see in that video and that picture. Now that this kid’s world famous for getting his ass handed to him, maybe it’ll be the shock he needs to wake up and start flying right. Probably not, but we can hope.