Chicken Soup explains how society isolates victims...

To put it mildly and in strict technical terms, victims of bullying suffer from a problem. And all problems have common elements.

There are three basic methods available to solve any problem:

1) You can use your bare hands.

2) You can combine your efforts with others.

3) You can employ tools.

Method 1: Bullies rarely make the mistake of targeting individuals who are able to punish them using nothing but the strength of their own bodies. When the victim uses this method, either the bully escalates the violence until the victim is injured or killed, or the victim is forced to injure or kill the bully. When the victim is injured or killed, brave and caring adults are certain to blame the victim and tell him that fighting is not the answer to our problems. When the bully is injured or killed, the victim will be aggressively railroaded for going too far. Bare hands are rarely, if ever an effective option for victims of bullying.

Method 2: American culture aggressively attacks and condemns victims who attempt to address the problem by ganging up on the bully. And the number of fellow victims willing to make the attempt is vanishingly small anyway. In the unlikely event that a group of victims actually did make the attempt, the bully's toadying sycophantic associates would attack the victims. Again, brave, caring adults would condemn the victims, not the bullies. There is a second scenario to Method 2. Complaining to an adult in authority about the bullying is condemned as tattling. Adults don't really think this is tattling. They're just avoiding their responsibility as adults. And if any witnesses become willing to make a report, this is referred to as snitching. Remember the immortal words of the assholes over at Sucker Punch Athletics dot com, "Snitches Get Stitches."

Method 3: This is what the Columbine killers did. They didn't try to become the Karate Kid. They just bought a few guns and took their revenge. Once again, American culture came to the rescue of the bullies who precipitated the massacre. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were widely condemned as cowards by those who wouldn't dare say the same thing about any of Columbine's precious steroid trash. Method 3 is rarely used. It requires victims who are both homicidal and suicidal, a statistically unusual combination.

Fifteen years after Columbine should have pulled everyone's heads out of their asses, Americans still love bullies and still hate their victims. Search your memory of that critical decade between the age you reached puberty and the age that most people who attend college either graduate or drop out, and consider the following stereotype:

Soulless, social climbing whores reward bullies. Toadying, sycophantic cowards blame their victims. Insulting as it is, it probably rings true for an awful lot of people.

And if that's not a steaming bowl of Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul, I don't know what is.