Exciting new career path: Bully Deprogrammer

Kids have always been complete little motherfuckers to each other. But now that everybody’s hyperconnected, bullies have new venues of attack, such as their Facey Pages, and IM, and of course they’re all Tweeting up a fuckin’ storm of hate for the kid who’s got a twitch or a skin condition or dated the wrong boy/girl or just exudes the intoxicating scent of weakness.

Child psychologists say that confronting the parents of a bully is rarely constructive because 1) they refuse to believe that their little cherub would ever do such a thing, or 2) the parents themselves are former bullies who believe that kids these days need to "toughen up". It’s hard to expect schools to effectively intervene; it’s a full time endeavor just to screen their students for weapons and drugs.

Good news, though! This societal ill represents a lucrative and fun new career path: Bully Deprogrammer. I'm going to be the first one. Here’s my plan. (Okay. Center my ki. Envision success. Act!) First, I take that online private investigation course from Phoenix University. Maybe a few psychology classes, too. (But I’ll probably just audit those.) Then I put out vaguely worded ads offering to “solve difficult social situations”, you know, like Robert McCall used to do in that 80s show, The Equalizer. (That show rocked.)

Parents, maybe schools, maybe the victims of bullies themselves get in touch with me and give me the name of the bully. I use my private investigation skills to dig up embarrassing info on the bully. Next, I seek out the bully in a place where he/she feels safe: the Dunkin Donuts parking lot, loitering in front of Hot Topic, etc. Then I reverse-bully the bully.

“Hey, I know you. You’re Billy Snodgrass. Yeah! Billy. Hey, you know what I found out the other day? You were born with a tail. That’s some weird shit! [Here I turn to Billy’s friends] That’s some weird shit, right? I thought that only happened on TV, but Billy here, his parents took him to have an operation when he was three months old. They cut the tail off. Sure, left a scar right at the base of his spine. It’s faint, but next gym class, check it out! Oh, yeah, and Billy? You were an accident. Your father drinks too much because of you.

“And Billy? Or should I say Monkey Boy? This is how you make Chad Connors feel in the cafeteria every day. And if you so much as give that kid the stink-eye and I hear about it, that video of you spanking it to Kristen Stewart in Breaking Dawn is going up on YouTube. You, Monkey Boy, will become the definition of viral.”

It’s just one of the concepts I’m working on.