Well, that was both appalling and unsurprising: A couple days ago, middle-school bullies canned the skinny kid on TV, primarily for the "offenses" of being both insufficiently worshipful of those doing the canning and already under so much stress at home that he really couldn't do much in response.
It was appalling because they just didn't care about the impression left by doing their bullying in public, nor of the substance of the bullying. Let's not consider that there were no adults in the room at all, let alone any with the authority or ability to "redirect" matters. Neither should we consider that the skinny kid was already offering to hand over his lunch money, but attempted public humiliation was more important to the bullies than actually exploiting their extortion.
It was unsurprising because both of the guys doing the canning have histories of being bullies — one relying on his father's status to evade actual discipline, the other on advantages of a kind he later denied and then attacked as related to accommodations he considered unfair. "Unfair" like "demonstrates empathy for others (and Others)," like "upholds principle instead of personal advantage," like "uses an advanced degree in an area related to that advanced degree." (Their gang is all too similar.)
It's been half a century since I was putting up with this shit in middle school. The adults were just as ineffective (not to mention uncaring and themselves devoted to a slightly different manner of bullying) then. The stakes were, admittedly, somewhat lower…