In this video you can see a 16 year old schoolboy pile drive a kid who has been bullying him for years. The video was posted on facebook by one of the bully’s friends, and from there ended up on Australia’s national news services. Don’t be fooled by the relative sizes of the kids, according to the accompanying story the larger boy in this footage had been bullied for years at his school, and he finally snapped when the little shit in the video started punching him. This video has created quite a controversy in Australia, because the school suspended the bullied child (as well, I think, as the bully) and lots of “experts” have been paraded in front of the media to talk about how this response is the wrong way to handle a bully. Here, for example, we have an opinion piece in the Herald telling us that this sort of thing is terribly wrong. Commenters on every piece, and on the youtube video, seem to be universally positive, however, and cite an age-old adage, that bullies are fundamentally cowards who cave in when someone strikes back.

I was bullied a lot at school, and for me the sight of the little shit in this video staggering to his feet and swaying about, barely conscious, was profoundly pleasant. I laughed aloud, and wished the bigger boy had followed it up with a nice solid punch to the face. Having been in the same situation as that bullied child, I know that on that day he made the amazing discovery that actually, most people are weak cowards, and even the biggest and scariest people back down if you confront them. His whole world will have changed, and the confidence he will have gained from watching that little snotling wobbling in front of him will never be forgotten. When I was a child I was knocked unconscious by bullies twice, and had a kneecap dislocated once. I was subjected to all the taunts and behaviour described in the linked article, and I discovered at the age of about 12 – when I first kicked one of my antagonizers as hard as I could in the balls, and left him mewling in a little ball in the middle of the playground – that the only language bullies understand is the language they speak. Drag them down from their arrogant heights in front of their mates, make them cry and scream and they will never again command any power over you. But even if your tactic backfires – as so many experts quoted over this incident will claim – and your bully returns fire, you have already won. I never won a fight at school – even the kid I testiculized came back (after an hour rummaging around in his pants desperately checking if his shrivelled little balls were still intact, no doubt) and punched me in the face, several times, while the whole school watched and cheered him. But no one in that school ever said a word against me ever again. The same is true of every other bully I ever confronted. Of course, if you can win, all the better, but I was the smallest kid in school with no sports skill and no muscles, so I always lost. But it was always a strategic defeat for the bully, because his bubble of superiority was punctured, and all the kids who laughed along with him knew they couldn’t entertain themselves at my expense.

By the final year of school, of course, all those kids knew that the years they’d wasted on being cool at school were coming back to bite them on the arse – me and my uncool nerdy mates had an out, we were heading to university and the big city, and my bullies were being left behind in a fading smelting town, with no work prospects and no qualifications. Even the pretty girls eventually abandoned them to hook up with a rich, nerdy banker. The only legacy the fucknuts at school can leave you from their bullying is the loss of your own confidence, and it’s so easy to stop them from doing even that. You just have to stand up to them, and even if it hurts, afterwards it’s you who has the pride, you who have shown you’re the stronger person, and everyone around them knows it even if they never tell you. Plus, you’ll be taking an important lesson into your adult life: if you stand up to people, they give you what you want. This is a lesson the bullies never learn, and if you’re the person who stands up to them you get the chance to teach them just how worthless they really are. Hopefully that lesson will persist through their whole future, cursing their social interactions, their sex lives and their careers, as some small recompense for all the children whose confidence they broke with their pointless cruelty.

So I take my hat off to that kid, I toast his success, and all the experts can take their meaningless advice and shove it up their arses. In honour of that video and his efforts, I’d like to share with you all a story from my high school days, which I think is the best “revenge against a bully” story that happened in my school days. It doesn’t concern me, but the nastiest and most violent bully in the school, and a mild-mannered kid from my friendship group who had been taunted by him for years. Let’s refer to them repsectively as Mr. Fucknuckle[1], and Plucky Ginger.

My school in this dusty smelting town had a tradition amongst kids that when a pressing matter needed to be resolved, the disputants in question would go to the nearby churchyard and duel it out. The rest of the troglodytes at my school would toddle along and form a cheering circle, and thus would important debates about academic achievement be resolved in the time-honoured fashion. Now it so happened that Mr. Fucknuckle had a long-standing enmity with another kid, perhaps not so much bullying as a general character dispute[2]. So they agreed to meet at the churchyard and because both were pretty nasty, it attracted a larger than average crowd. Now, to his credit, Mr. Fucknuckle was a pretty savage fighter, and big, and scary, and he won the fight pretty quickly (I think it was to “first blood” in this instance).

However, amongst the crowd was Plucky Ginger, who had been enduring low-level taunts and the occasional violent instance from Mr. Fucknuckle for years. I don’t know what happened this particular day – maybe it was the stress of coming exams, maybe he’d seen a video on the internet[3] – but something inside him broke, some barrier against all the rage of the underdog, and out of the crowd he charged, while Mr. Fucknuckle was still basking in the glory of the moment. Before anyone could stop him he launched a surprise attack, bowled Mr. Fucknuckle over, and sprung atop him. From this position he launched a classic “ground ‘n pound” attack, punching him over and over in the face in a frenzied and insane manner. He did a lot of very nasty-looking superficial damage to Mr. Fucknuckle’s screwed-up, ugly little mug, and true to their characters, the troglodytes in the crowd cheered him on. Finally one of Mr. Fucknuckle’s sycophants ran over and dragged him off, but this wasn’t the reason Plucky Ginger stopped. It turns out he had punched so frenziedly and repeatedly that at some point in the attack he had broken his hand.

So, Plucky Ginger retreated from the field of battle and Mr. Fucknuckle slunk away, dripping blood and covered in bruises, his invincibility finally and convincingly disproved by the boy everyone knew he had been bullying for years. His aura was shattered, and Plucky Ginger made anew. The fact that he had broken his hand venting his rage earned him even greater respect, and from that time on he was never again subjected to a single bad word by any of the varied crew of trogs and sub-humans in our Shared Learning Space.

So if you’re reading this, kids, take my advice and the advice of generations of bullied kids everywhere: ignore the experts and do what the kid in the video did. Smash the bully, as hard as you can, without fear of the consequences. Even if he hits you back, he has already lost, and when you see the banking of the evil light in his eyes, the power that flows through you will keep your spirits aloft for years to come.

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fn1: I never suffered under the tyranny of Mr. Fucknuckle because he tried me on early in my time at the school – year 11 – with a simple and age old antagonism. During touch football practice I touched him, and in front of the whole PE class he said to me (in his typically slovenly bully’s “language”) “Touch me again and I’ll bash ya, mate.” So in front of everyone, right there and then, I touched him. Challenged in such an upfront way, there was nothing he could do – bashing me would look trite and silly (and the PE teacher was there) and he’d gain nothing, since I clearly wasn’t scared of him. He uttered the typical “huh, you aren’t worth it” but never again ventured to do anything except exchange the odd uncivil grunt with me. If only he had been so sensible with Plucky Ginger…

fn2: Hard though it is to imagine that teenage boys, let alone Mr. Fucknuckle, have a character on which to base a dispute

fn3: Which actually hadn’t been invented yet[4], and of this fact I am eternally grateful. Bullying is much much nastier now that the immoral little fucksticks can bully you out of school hours without even being in your presence[5]

fn4: I know I know, strictly speaking it had been, just not disseminated…

fn5: Although let’s get this clear, verbal abuse is not worse than physical abuse. When people physically abuse you, they tend to also verbally abuse you. It’s not like they hit you silently.