IF THE BULLIED ARE BULLIES THEN WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?

The MySpace hoax that led to a teen suicide. The Florida teens who roughed up a classmate and posted it on Youtube. Bullying is totally a trend, which can only mean it's time for the NYT to do a story on it.

A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly is a lengthy profile on one specific student, fifteen year old Billy Wolfe, who gets beat up daily. He is assaulted and punched while kids take video of it with their cell phones. But that's just the tip of the violent iceberg. Little Billy's parents have "binders," as in those huge file folders, full of school and police reports documenting his bruises.

Poor, poor Billy. How is he still alive? Not only does he get beat up, but he gets to represent the victims of childhood violence and social ostracizing, only giving kids more reason to kick his ass. It's like now they have to-he has been deemed the whipping post by the most prestigious paper in the nation. He is a marked man.

But wait a second...shit. Dry your eyes - Billy is also a bully. A parent whose child goes to Billy's school is also a blogger and makes it known that our poor little abused lamb was arrested after harassing a student confined to a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy. He snuck up behind him and began screaming, bounced a ball off his head and called him a retard. Billy also picked on a foreign exchange student whose mother had just died of cancer, calling him a 'gay [expletive ] German" and his 'deceased mother a vulgar name.'

So who is the victim? Maybe Billy is just acting out due to all the bullying he received? Or maybe he receives it because he is a bully? Is this where the weak become heros or is this were society gets dragged down to the level of its lowest common denominator?

I don't know. I do know that this is a long post and I am sorry for that, but this shit is so fucked up and so beyond answer that it just needs to be out there, somewhere in the blogosphere waiting for someone smarter than me to find it.

But on a lighter note, you can be happy about one thing. You're no longer a kid.