India.

> The eye drops are made in India, and "we understand that the same product is also marketed under other brand names," the company says. The manufacturer, Global Pharma Healthcare PVT Limited, is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on a recall, EzriCare says.

A whole lot of pharmaceuticals are made there.

That guy looks like he ran a few things up the flagpole to see who salutes it.

I don't know exactly what went wrong here, but things I have noticed over the years:

• Parents can be completely blind about what little shits their children are. There is this endless association of children with innocence, and parents are sometimes incapable of believing their children could possibly be a bully. The more clueless parents are, the worse their kids can be. In particular, there seems to be a lackadaisical approach toward teaching children empathy. Whatever my parents failings, they would always ask me, "How do you think a person feels, when you say or do X." I am happy for this.

• Parents may secretly be happy their children are bullies, when they regard the world as some kind of jungle and the only way they can conceptualize it is their children are either predators or prey and they have chosen to be predators.

Some of the things I have heard parents say are wild, and not entirely sane.

• In my school in central New Jersey, bullying was viewed as "kids being kids" and treated with no seriousness at all. This was a few decades ago, but I remember really being confused as a kid, like, "Okay, well, is there something they want me to learn by being bullied? Is this a life lesson I need to reason my way out of?" Bullying is assault and cruelty, but the way administrators treated it, it was my problem, and my problem alone.

• Bullies congregate in certain cliques and groups and certain school personnel who are tasked with supervising these groups (like coaches) seem unconcerned about their character of the students, or may openly encourage their behavior. In my high school, the wrestling team were all bullies. In my yearbook, one of them chose as their yearbook quote, a rant about how he didn't want gay people to become wrestlers.

• Or, people make excuses for bullies. They themselves have a hard life, or something. Therefore you shouldn't be angry when they assault you. Or some shit.

• My own father just got mad I didn't fight off the 3 or 4 people who would gang up on me at once. I was not a small kid.

What made me angry, is you have no choice but to go to school. You are legally compelled to enter these environments and have these experiences. You can't simply say "fuck this," and opt out.

I have a very dark view of humankind, and it hasn't abated in the decades since. I don't trust people, and this position of immediate distrust is regularly justified. No one picks on me now, but when people turn out to be really horrible and shitty, it doesn't surprise me. I expect it. I am surprised when someone isn't shitty.

Those experiences dampened an entire life. And in hindsight I'm less mad at the bullies, and more angry at the adults who create these environments and seem uninterested in what happens in them. That includes parents, teachers, and administrators.

That said, when I read the story about this girl a few weeks ago, in an involuntary way, my mind made up what this girl's antagonizers looked like, and I imagined strangling them with my bare hands. I just imagined crushing the life out of them. What I was feeling was pure hate, an emotion I do not relish and is not something I feel with any regularity. But that is what I felt.

I am middle aged.

I don't want to think about this anymore.

One thing it certainly did is make me look at the generation of "adults" who were in charge of the schools I went to and lose all respect for them. In a way, this has a positive upside. I am not nostalgic about the past - any past - and as I age, there has been no compulsion to resist progress, or to want to take shit out on the young. All of my disgust is targeted toward older generations, their moral failings, and their generalized incompetence.

I have to expend effort not to make this categorical, and to give individuals a chance. I expend that effort, but it doesn't come natural.