Your posts in this thread, as usual, are just bizarre ramblings, apparently meandering in an attempt to reach some sort of political point in a non-political thread. Participation trophies have nothing to do with this. Immigration has nothing to do with this. Regardless of generation, location, socioeconomic status, etc, middle schoolers and high schoolers always want to be the cool kids, and that lends itself to putting others down, getting other kids to laugh at someone else's expense, etc. Do you have any firsthand experience with this topic or are you just trying to sound off on something you really don't know much about? You think kids are walking around with machetes??
This subject hits home for me because I was bullied every day in middle school and to a lesser extent throughout most of high school. Fortunately, never any incident as bad as the one in the OP, and there were others in my school who got it worse than I did, but having to face it every day for years affects you, especially when you have nobody to go to about it. My closest friends would also join in on harassing me when the more popular kids were around because it was cooler to align with them instead of me. Looking back on it now, there are two things I keep thinking about:
(1) I am glad that I just barely escaped high school before social media became widespread because at least the black cloud over my head would temporarily go away when the school bus would get to my stop each afternoon and when school let out for summer vacation--the kids today have no escape from their bullies and today's technology makes it much easier to humiliate someone to a much larger audience.
(2) It still bothers me that the teachers, lunch aides, bus drivers, and administration never did anything to try to stop it, never punished the bullies, never did a single thing about it. In fact, the one time I finally had enough and picked up something that was thrown at me and threw it back at the other kid, I got detention, and shortly after that, the main kid that tormented me received the school's Random Act of Kindness Award for some mundane thing he did. Being a good student and always staying out of trouble didn't allow for getting into fights with the bullies, especially with the school's zero tolerance policy. In retrospect, being a well-behaved student isn't as important as I thought it was back then, and standing up to the assholes would have had a much more positive long-term impact on me than maintaining a clean record at school.
I don't think bullying is really going to be solved unless we somehow raise kids to be compassionate towards those who are less popular than them, rather than using them as fodder to boost their own image. The OPs call for teaching your kids to stick up for others who are being bullied is a great place to start.
