oo dei ba?

That's the first three words that popped into my head when one of the scouts under me during my stint as an ASCL asked me about what's the proper thing to do when you are to choose between beating the living crap out of someone or to endure constantly aggravating and insulting remarks.

My first suggestion was for him to just beat the crap out of the guy inside a CR or somewhere the physical argument will be discreet. But there's nothing discreet about injuries and a punch to the gut is a direct stimulus to punching someone's face. The resulting facial deformity will then have the parents involved. So, it's not a good suggestion at all.

Then I asked him why does he really feel an urge to physically retaliate? He told me that he occasionally gets hit by a basketball intentionally from the assailant.

It got me into thinking, the status quo is that when you get hit, you do not retaliate. Since common sense will tell you that if you will, you get into a fistfight and a fistfight ruins the name of the school/office you're in.

Why? because first of all, aggravations are subtle. There can only be witnesses and no evidences (unless of course you record the confrontation. Second, although they are subtle, they really illicit a response from the person they try to piss off. The case of my friend is just that. You would be called a wuss if you go to the prefect and complain about getting a ball thrown to you unexpectedly right? Or that someone ran a verbal slander about you. Then third, if you do beat up the person, that person will complain to his family and his family will confront the school and you might be off. The prefect would then say that beating someone up is not commensurate to all that pressure inside you as a result of several days/weeks/months/years of insults.

Our society is designed so that people can piss others off while the one getting pissed off has to be thinking twice about how the rules will make it hard for him to stop the subtle annoyances which are actually degrading to his dignity.

That's the reason why in our society, bullies still exist. Everywhere. In the classroom, in the court rooms, on the mat, in the jeepney, out on the streets, they exist because the authorities don't pay attention to subtle insults or degrading actions. They exist because the authorities demand more from the complainant than from the one being complained, they demand more responsibility from the person who beats up the idiot who keeps on annoying him instead from that idiot who constantly annoys him.

As long as it takes more time, effort and resources to rightfully and legally settle things instead of just settling them like how a man should, this world will always have bullies.

As long as the butcher who sells meat can't complain even in small claims court about the guy who steals his goods (because if he did, she would lose a day/week/month's worth of earnings for his family), we can always look forward to vigilante killings via butcher's knife and seeing dead, chopped-up bodies at night near the marketplace.

As long as the ones who get bullied would rather beat the crap out of the bully instead of their complaints falling to the deaf ears of the prefect or enduring daily insults and other attacks to their dignity, there will always be gun-toting Asians on a killing spree in the US.

Absurd as it may sound, men will always be men and men will defend their ego no matter what. Heck, even gay people defend their egos. And i would rather hear that people from my school stand up for themselves and fight back when they get stepped on rather than hearing that in my school, there's an ongoing bully mafia while everyone else are a bunch of cowards who'd rather silently suffer.

Nice guys finish last.