I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
I remember lots of my classmates mocking my math teacher because of her accent, when I was a freshman. She was from Syria, in a mexican school. Little pieces of shit were always imitating her accent and mocking her from getting certain words wrong.
I saw her about four years later and she looked so tired of everything, less cheerful and with a tougher attitude from the beginning. Fortunately she still talks to me calmly and smiling, but it’s awful to know she’s always anxious around thw kids she teaches.
In seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Burns. It was only her third year of teaching, and it was her first year of teaching middle school. And the class I had her for?
My fellow classmates were fucking awful to Ms. Burns. They talked over her when she was trying to teach, they made fun of her appearance (said she looked like man and called her a ‘tranny’, or “It Burns” instead of Ms. Burns), and when a few months into the school year, she broke down and screamed at the top of her lungs at the class before sitting down at her desk and crying, they considered it a triumph and laughed about it for weeks.
Being a kid doesn’t exempt you from being a piece of shit, and just because, on the whole, adults have more power than minors doesn’t mean that minors get a free pass on being purposefully cruel to adults. Some of you on this website really need to learn this.
Not related to teaching (though that’s an excellent example of an environment in which abuse against both adults and minors occurs), but over the course of various therapy programs both online and offline, I have met adults – who shall remain anonymous, unless they ever want to come forward themselves – who have been violently sexually abused by minors, who have been otherwise physically assaulted by minors, and who have been (this one is especially common) emotionally/verbally abused by minors.
And these ones have been targeted because they are adults, and that made abusing them convenient, in many communities, to abuse. This was often because, when the adult spoke out, the minor in question could easily fall back on “I can’t abuse you, you’re an adult, and you suggesting that I could be abusive is abusive toward me.”
I feel like the main issue (and definitely the issue on this and other social media sites) is that people are conflating individual abuse with systemic injustice. You can be in a more socially privileged position than someone else and still be abused by them on a personal level. Kids and teens don’t systemically oppress adults, but that doesn’t mean they can’t abuse them in their daily, individual interactions with each other.
In other words, your abuser may often be less privileged than you are in various ways, but that still doesn’t negate that they’re an abuser.
stop wanting. you are whole. detach yourself from the feeling of need. you are enough.
you only feel lonely bc humans evolved as a social species and were never meant to live in social isolation, slaving away day in day out with minimal contact to other people, that is very superficial at best not a single hint of intimacy, like it is the norm now lmfao no one can overwrite that by “detaching”, quite the contrary, detachment is a sign of depression CAUSED by severe social deprivation
I hate tumblr hot takes like that. our society is broken and anti-social and it’s making us SICK. normalizing this and pretending like it’s your personal failure that you can’t deal with something you were never meant to able to deal with bc we didn’t evolve to be alone is absolutely counter productive
I think people really underestimate how fucking evil a large chunk of American Christianity is, when they try to say to antichoicers “well if you’re against abortion, at least you should support things like WIC and SNAP, so that women facing an unplanned pregnancy can still feed their future kid”
I’ll be blunt, to American Christians like this, “but single mothers and their kids will starve!” is the entire fucking point. Being ostracized by your family and community and left for you and your bastard child to starve alone in abject misery and deprivation is what they believe the Godly punishment should be for being “unchaste,” and that things like food benefits and contraception are destroying moral society because they let women have unapproved sex without being as controlled by the fear of being cast out to starve with an unwanted kid (this also heavily ties into misogynist racism against woc, especially black women, who are accused of being “welfare queens,” draining good, properly chaste white Christians with kids born from their supposedly mindlessly lustful and irresponsible behavior, that can only be kept in check with threats of starvation or violence).
“Women (especially woc) cannot overcome their base urges and live virtuous lives without being heavily trained and coerced by threats of deprivation, isolation, and violence” is one of the most important unspoken ground rules of reactionary movements, both religious and secular
Evangelicals have no long-standing theological problem with abortion. My parents have been married for longer than evangelicals have been against abortion. Evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t care about abortion. Being against abortion was a Catholic thing. Evangelicals thought abortion is unfortunate, but not evil.
What changed?
Bob Jones v. US (1983).
Bob Jones University, an evangelical school, had a segregationist dating policy. It means what you think it does – they wouldn’t allow white students to date black students. They also wouldn’t admit black students who supported interracial marriage. This was in the mid-70s. Loving v Virginia was nearly a decade in the rearview mirror. The government threatened to revoke their tax-exempt status as a university unless this Jim Crow shit stopped. The school sued, and this eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Court, unsurprisingly, agreed with the government.
What was clear to evangelical leaders, then, in 1983, was that out-and-out racism was no longer going to be tolerated. What could they focus on that would have the same effect? What could rally the base without openly espousing racist views?
Reagan, with his “welfare queens” dog-whistle politicking gave them a like-minded politician glad of their support. And Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was only to happy to tell people what he thought of abortion.
So here we are, thirty-five years later, with every evangelical doing their damnedest to pretend that evangelicals have always been against abortion. They’ve lied themselves into believing it, and now they claim they’re against birth control too. That’s even more spurious – If they actually thought life begins at conception, then birth control would be a necessity, because fertilized eggs being rejected is the norm. Most of what they want to call human life never even gets implanted in the womb, or lasts very long if it does. And if they cared about life, welfare programs ought to be the most important, to ensure everyone has a good standard of living worthy of human beings.
But they don’t care about those things, so the only conclusion is that they are not pro-life. They just don’t want to see family planning and health care go to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc.
It was never about being pro-life.
(and incidentally – Bob Jones v US was an 8-1 decision. Who was the dissenting voice? None other than William Rehnquist. Who was elevated to Chief Justice by Reagan when Warren Burger retired a few years later. None of what has happened has happened by accident)
And it’s worth noting that Bob Jones University defended their policy exclusively on religious freedom grounds, but Rehnquist’s dissent was based entirely on procedural grounds. Even the one justice who was “on their side” didn’t buy their argument and had to justify it on other grounds. It’s been a long road from BJU v. US to the Hobby Lobby case.
He ALSO called the shooting a “wicked act of mass murder.” I don’t support him or his policies, but at least give him credit where it’s due.
because god knows he’s known for his honesty and following through on what he says
He even called the synagogue bombing “Anti-Semitic!” Not that I like him–I don’t–but you have to admit he said the right thing there. Of course, he also said the wrong thing in his speech, but it was immediately followed by the right one.
the problem is that he says the right thing to placate apathetic masses only to use dogwhistles to immediately assuage the fears of white supremacists
1600s: most witch-hunts ended in this century. no witches were burned in North America; they were hanged or in one case pressed to death
1700s: the American Revolution. Marie Antoinette. the French Revolution. the crazy King George. most pirate movies
1800-1830: Jane Austen! Pride and Prejudice! those dresses where the waist is right under one’s boobs and men have a crapton of facial hair inside high collars
1830-1900: Victorian. Les Miserables is at the beginning, the Civil War is in the middle, and Dracula is at the end
1900-1920: Edwardian. Titanic, World War I, the Samantha books from American Girl, Art Nouveau
1920s: Great Gatsby. Jazz Age. Flappers and all that. most people get this right but IT IS NOT VICTORIAN. STUFF FROM THIS ERA IS NOT VICTORIAN. DO NOT CALL IT VICTORIAN OR LIST IT ON EBAY AS VICTORIAN. THAT HAPPENS SURPRISINGLY OFTEN GIVEN HOW STAGGERING THE VISUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ERAS IS. also not 100 years ago yet, glamour.com “100 years of X” videos. you’re lazy, glamour.com. you’re lazy and I demand my late Edwardian styles
I just saw people referencing witch burning and Marie Antoinette on a post about something happening in 1878. 1878. when there were like trains and flush toilets and early plastic and stuff. if you guys learn nothing else about history, you should at least have vague mental images for each era
“Les Miserables is at the beginning, the Civil War is in the middle, and Dracula is at the end” sounds like the longest weirdest worst movie I’d pay to see in theatres five times.
rip tumblr 