Hope and Optimism on Conquering Bullying?

[Eric the Green]

(08-14-2019, 08:18 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: ...there was this idiotic idea (coming from Silents and Boomers) that a) it's the perpetrators who need help, not the victims, and b) bullies just suffer from the fact that they feel low self-worth. Today, we've finally seen that the opposite is the case: Bullies have an inflated self-worth, that's why they think they were allowed to do anything. It was like trying to extinguish a fire with gasoline.

Furthermore: The Nomads learned that you had to be cool and jaded if someone calls you an asshole or worse. But if the same Nomads used bad words at home, they'd make their parents unhappy. But as long as what the bully does to them is worse than what their parents are doing... yes, the old people created an environment where the bullies have more influence on kids than their parents!

It was the perfect storm.

Generation X too often has reverted to the cynical views of generations previous to the later Silents. Being a Boomer, THAT is the problem I see going on, except that I also see that Silents and Boomers as they got past 40 years old or so have ALSO reverted to a cynical view!

The idiotic idea from the Silents and Boomers was correct, basically. People who bully are acting from the cravings and attachments that possess them, as Buddhists call it. Christians call it temptation. It's not strictly speaking "self-esteem," but it's ignorance of our true nature, which is divine, and which need not be possessed by these cravings and attachments. So it's actually the fact that bullies have a deflated sense of self-worth. 

But just encouraging self-esteem is really not enough to truly liberate oneself from these attachments and temptations. That takes a lot of spiritual practice, which our commercial, materialist and hedonistic culture does not exactly encourage. But such practices have been taught and made available by the new age culture which Silents and Boomers have provided in some places, in blue states at least.

Generation Xers such as yourself have confused this message which came through during the 2T to Silents and Boomers, to the idea that therefore bullies can think they are allowed to do anything.

Meanwhile, allowing bullies to do anything has not exactly been the philosophy among the older generations where law and order was concerned. After the permissiveness, drugs and riots in the ghettos in the late sixties led to a crackdown, sentences were increased and people were locked up too long for minor crimes or for crimes they didn't commit. Hence the need for criminal justice reform today that even conservatives agree with now. Meanwhile concern over sexual misconduct and crime has continued to grow to the point where punishments are often worse than the offenses.

I don't follow your convoluted second paragraph too well. I guess you are saying that bullies that were fellow Gen Xers had more influence than parents on other nomads, because the nomads had been taught by their fellow nomads and by the boomer culture to be cool and accept bullying?