Don't worry about the incoherence, and no need to apologise. Writing the actual post took a couple of hours for me, because I had to trim out all the bits where my own incoherence took over. Memories of bullying aren't pleasant at the best of times, and I often feel the consequences of bullying are overlooked by society at large. Too often it's written off as "kids being kids", particularly at the upper primary and high school levels, where what it actually resembles is a group of young adults getting away with outright criminal behaviour because they know it will be overlooked or tolerated.

In many ways, the popular use of the internet is extremely important in the matrix of dealing with the bullying problem. For one thing, it's a place where the victims of bullying can speak out and let their side of the story be heard, including things like the long-term consequences of bullying (you're not the only person who has suffered long-term effects). For another, it's instructive in showing the way bullying behaviours aren't just "kids being kids" - they're humans being humans, and they crop up in any circumstance where the bully thinks they can get away with it (flaming, trolling, cyber-stalking, cyber-harassment etc) no matter what the age of the bully might be. It offers a forum for bullying behaviours which is much broader than most previous fora, and thus brings bullying behaviours to a much wider audience, many of whom are well equipped to name and shame it for what it is. It raises the awareness of how bullying works in a social sense (effectively it's about locking people out of the social matrix of a culture, making them non-persons, and if possible completely destroying them). It also makes it possible for people to look at bullying on a global scale, and point out things about the culture of bullying which is endemic to so many Western cultural processes.

When I can say something about a culture of bullying in a school in New South Wales, referring to my experience of the culture of bullying in a school in Western Australia some twenty years earlier, and get empathetic responses from people who went to schools in the United States of America and underwent the culture of bullying there, it's a sign that schoolyard bullying is bigger than just "kids being kids".

I'm hopeful that in the long term, we're standing at the door to a new epoch, one where bully-style behaviour is regarded as a social solecism of the greatest degree; where it's treated as being the crime it is. I'm hopeful that the sort of consciousness-raising we're doing here, where we're realising just how widespread bullying behaviour is, and just how much it *did* hurt us as kids and is still hurting us as adults, will be the beginning of something better for the kids of the future.

The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.