“Bullying” - Grade School Lessons Revisited
Contributed by Doug Ferguson
Back in June of 2020, following the lawless “George Floyd” riots that swept across the country that May, I published an opinion piece in this paper titled “What I Learned in Grade School Applied to Today’s World”. You can read it again by searching in this papers achieves.
In this piece I related the lessons I learned as kid growing up in a new development with lots of other boys around my age (in that era mostly outdoors and largely unsupervised) regarding “Bullying” and being “Bullied”. The main one being: If you don’t stand up to a Bully the very first time he tries it on you, it will be worse the next time and you can end up as a permanent victim. I then related how the lack of official response to lawlessness at one of our well-known Eastern colleges in the early 60’s had emboldened the “Bullies” involved and had set the stage for the current spectacle of national lawlessness in many of our social movements since.
Fast forward to 2024 when, after our recent presidential election, it appears we have finally as a nation grown tired of being victims of the “woke” segment of our population and are about to “fight back” or at least override the “Bullies” who brought us to where we are today economically and socially. Having let this trend go so long, it is difficult to see how this is all going to play out, but it is encouraging to see that a numerical majority of Americans want our leaders to try and reverse the trends of the past several decades. Given all our national media “Bullies”, it’s going to be a challenge.
Hopefully we can do this without resorting to violence or violating the basic protection of our freedoms as stated in our constitution without resorting to the kind of “Bullying” that got us here in the first place. Whether this can be done at this point to a great extent depends on the support our leaders receive from the majority who just indicated by their vote that they want the change.
Remember, “Bullying” is not about intellectual theories, political systems, etc. It is about personal power and it this doesn’t change no matter at what level of society in which it is practiced, whether it be in the back yard, school yard or in international affairs!