Kids know a bully when they see one.
Sometimes I think growing up, becoming "civilized," is a process of having a natural moral sense based around values like care & kindness brutally crushed & abused, until the point you can look at cruelty and see "strength"
That's why so many schools display such abject helplessness in the face of bullying -- they can't endorse it officially, yet they still recognize it as imparting all the desired lessons.
We get Lord of the Flies entirely wrong, thinking it's about how British schoolboys of the 1950s, without adult supervision, "reverted" to "savagery"
It's about how British schoolboys of the 1950s, without adult supervision, play-acted at being adults with all the colonialist hierarchies and brutality they had seen modeled as adult behavior.
They weren't going "primitive" at all, they were attempting to recreate what they saw as CIVILIZATION but because they were kids, the nuances were lost and the cruelty of civilization became shockingly obvious.
One of the things a lot of #ExVangelicals know is the pain of being shamed for your natural feelings of compassion toward anyone who might be damned in their scheme of things.
"They'll all go to hell"
"Well surely not EVERYONE--"
"No, everyone. And you should be GLAD about it too. If you were truly righteous, it would bring you great joy to contemplate the eternal torment of the damned."
"Well surely not EVERYONE--"
"No, everyone. And you should be GLAD about it too. If you were truly righteous, it would bring you great joy to contemplate the eternal torment of the damned."
I'm no longer ashamed that I never quite got the hang of glorying in cruelty.
Which reminds me, I should pick up my copy of #EmptyThePews
