The Brutalization of the Different

One of the great tragedies and one of the most problematic happenings in our schools and our society in general is the maltreatment of the different. The people who think differently, the people who act differently, anyone who deviates from the standard of normality the culture and predominant group sets for people. 

    Different people have suffered in humanity for the longest time, and some of the most brilliant people have been persecuted and killed before they even have a chance of contributing amazing benefits and advances to society.

    It is one of the great tragedies of our world that some of the people who can help humanity the most are violated and sometimes killed before they can even contribute their gifts.

In schools, the gifted, the extremely intelligent, the brilliant, many of these people are mistreated, bullied, and even brutalized by their peers. It happens out of fear and jealousy, and the predatory tendency of humans that lead them to prey on what they deem to be weakness. Differentness is often misconstrued as weakness.

Unfortunately, even into adulthood, this doesn't completely stop. It just changes. The persecution and mistreatment becomes more economic, with limitations to opportunities for advancement and restriction of access to certain resources. 

Even mature adults (or those who think they are) persecute and disenfranchise people because of differentness and misunderstanding. Even with the legal protections against discrimination by certain social and cultural factors like race and religion, persecution and discrimination just becomes a little more subtle and a little more cloaked. 

 You can discriminate and persecute by cloaking the real reason for your mistreatment and discrimination behind an excuse that makes your discrimination seem more legitimate. You can justify oppression and persecution with a reason that makes it seem justified or even necessary and cloak it in deception and distortion and dismiss the objections or resistance as paranoid or delusion.

    The brutalization of the different has some real, lasting consequences, both for the individual, and sometimes even society as a whole. You brutalize intelligent people, you can create some seriously dangerous monsters. Extremely intelligent people can do some serious damage under the motivation of revenge and retribution for brutalization that could have been avoided had the system not failed them. 

This could lead to some serious harm, even mass death or destruction, all because the society and individuals within it allowed such immense mistreatment or brutalization. If you brutalize the intelligent and gifted, you bare a little responsibility when they snap and explode, and some people in the world can be quite scary when you push them over the edge.

Unfortunately society does this all the time, and then they have to spend years or even decades containing the problem, and this maltreatment and brutality can destroy lives and break hope and happiness for many of the people involved.

As I continue to recover from my own brutalization, I promise I am not at risk for such an explosion. To some extent it's already happened. I'm trying to move past vengeful desires. You can either create heroes or monsters through brutality, and I'm no monster. I'm not quite a hero either. I'm just a guy trying to move past the horrible things that have happened to me.