18. Winners
At school, I vividly remember that my life was heading in the right direction according to the powers that ruled my life. Well, that was the case before the bullying.
After the bullying I managed to keep afloat, but I no longer felt life made sense, or that I knew what made me feel good. I started navigating a path of survival, anxiety and insecurity that I am still transiting today.
But this is not a post about the consequences of bullying in the long-term. I already covered that in previous posts.
This post is about the perpetrators of the bullying. How were they perceived then by the powers of that time? I need to distinguish two types of bullies that were involved in my nightmare.
On the one hand, the leaders. The ones who started bullying me. They were two classmates only. Both had a strong sense of self-confidence. One, the leading one, the one who actually started the bullying, was the son of a local reputed politician, well connected, educated, distinguished. His older brother attended the same school. He was performing quite terribly at school, but it did not seem to matter, and it did not matter when it comes to his future. His family helped him when he needed, so he did not struggle to find a comfortable job position, added to the structural wellness of his family. At school he was terrible, definitely not in the right path, according to what I was told on a daily basis for years. He was not kind, he did not seem very clever, he was not behaving. But he had what it takes to be successful in the current world: contacts, money, time and confidence.
The other leader was a bit of a different profile. He was not from such a comfortable family, and you could tell. But his self confidence was unparalleled. He was terrible at school, I would have never thought he could do any good. Always teasing the others, always showing off, terrible at most subjects, funny but quite stupid in his simplicity. And yet, he became a successful manager in today’s world. His selfishness, ambition and lack of ethics proved useful. I saw him in the news a few years ago, and it shocked me in a painful way.
But these two were not the only cases of bulliers turned into successful grown-ups.
On the other hand among the bulliers were all the classmates that joined the two leaders in their actions against me. This was a more heterogeneous group, indeed. A few were also from comfortable families of good means, and also quite poor in their performance at school. They found jobs without much problem, thanks to contacts and determination.
This second group has also what I can call my peers. Classmates from humble families, guys with a delicate self-esteem who joined the leaders in order to feel, I guess, more important. They seconded the bullying, shielded behind the leaders.
Some of them had been long-time school friends, and in following years the even acted as if we were still friends and nothing had happened. In the future, sone did better than others. Interestingly, some of them found jobs thanks to those leaders. I guess it was like paid favors for their shameful following.
Bottom line: bulliers have it easier in today’s world. The values of individualism and thought competition that we have built this society upon is a golden territory for bulliers.
We can talk and reject bullying, but at the end of the day bullying is a symptom of something useful for the future. I read that a bullying has negative consequences for the bulliers too, but it just does not seen to be the case fir the guys who bullied me.
