OK, listen up. Back before teh interwebz, back in the 80's, I had a bunch of my "classmates" pull a home invasion of my house afterschool during broad daylight with my parents both at work, and they robbed and ransacked the house and harassed me, they cut the phone line WHILE I WAS TALKING TO MY GRANDMOTHER, who lived five towns away but thankfully heard the commotion and called the cops in my
Bergenfield. Remember, cellphones didn't exist yet unless you were working on Wall Street and they were ginormous.
Even though all the crooks got arrested/ put on probation, the local Tattler Papers all had stories in them, and I became the butt of jokes and "Garage Sale at Justin's House!" Signs all over town for months after.
Yeah, I wasn't beaten nor raped or shitting my britches, ok. You don't think I suffered humiliation for not being able to defend my house? And I did not commit suicide. Or drop out of school. I had to "tough it out". Even my Aunt and Cousin were all over me because my cousin and I traded Atari VCS cartridges and one that was his was stolen and never retrieved by the cops, and they blamed ME. My Aunt was basicaly taking the "rape-line", insinuating that I "asked for it". I was 13. I asked for no such thing.
I reacted by taking the money I made working my afterschool job, and instead of buying an Atari 5200 like all the cool kids I enrolled in TaeKwanDo class, made it up two belts, white then yellow then orange.
Beatings started the next year, believe it. Nightmare on Elm Street became a favorite of mine, and I was nearly suspended from school for making Freddy Blades (with butter knives) in Metal Shop. Again, even before Teh Interwebz, people TALKED. And they didn't catch the butterknives. HEHEHEHEHE. Tales DO grow, don't they. By Freshman year of High School, I went from nerd to Creepy Stalker Guy and was left alone. But that cost me any positive social standing/ in-town girlfriends/votes for being class president, as you can well imagine.
My point is, 4 out of 5 other highschool classmates made a suicide pact with one deciding not to sit in the idling car in the garage (Google Bergenfield Suicides '88) . I made a choice, might not have been the best, but it was a damn site better than THAT. ULTIMATE POINT: Humiliation will eventually fade, nut up and don't make a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Kids today are SOOOOOOO sensitive, and in greater numbers than in my day.
