The Bullying Experiment

Not sure if I was a bully in school or not, but here's how I handled some of my issues after being "bullied" (some have called it abuse) at home by a step-parent.

My friend (who also had a very similar upbringing) and I played on the junior high and high school football teams...mostly to get our aggressions out. There's nothing like being fully padded head to toe and getting to knock the **** out of someone you hated..then getting praised by the coach. That was fun and fulfilling to a point.

When that wasn't enough, we would target bullies in school. You know, the alpha-hotels who always picked on kids half their size, kids with mental challenges, or kids they just didn't like, etc. If we witnessed an incident we didn't like, it was go-time.

We'd catch them alone after school and teach them a lesson they were very unlikely to forget. I won't elaborate, but it did involve giving them a dose of their own medicine and allowing them to feel with crystal clarity what it was like to be on the receiving end. I know one guy who still remembers it 39 years later (I feel kinda bad about that one).

Instances of bullying did coincidentally subside while we were in school. I know now that doesn't classify what we were doing as acceptable, but times were different in the 70's. I'm even sure some teachers knew it was us doing the punishing, but didn't say anything.

Maybe this is why I like vigilante movies so much.