Daniel showed me a YouTube video of two boys on "Britain’s Got
Talent". The younger boy wrote the song
that the two of them performed about bullying and how he felt when he was
bullied.
First Lady Melania Trump said that she was going to make cyber-bullying
her priority while her husband, Pres. Trump, was in office. While Trump was on the campaign trail and
even after he was inaugurated, cyber-bullying has seemed to be his style… actually, bullying in general is more his style.
Most people agree that bullying is bad. Pushing other kids or adults to do what you
want them to do through mean words, threats and even violence is wrong. I think that if you sat 100 people down and
asked them if they thought bullying was an ethical/moral way to go about
getting your way, most - if not all - would say no… but….
That sentiment seems to never have included businesses,
governments, or international affairs.
While we, most of us as U.S. citizens, like to think of our government as a protector of all its
people, we are seeing a whole new level of bullying… and though it seems more extreme, this is not a new phenomenon.
Historically, government and those in
power blame disenfranchised people for all the ills of the nation… the crime,
the violence, the slums. We bully them
into thinking they are to blame instead of looking at where most of the
problems REALLY come from… a huge gap in the distribution of wealth and power.
With our last group (from Haverhill, MA, and Raleigh NC), we were asked to share about the history and reality of Nicaragua back in the 1980s... when the new revolutionary people's government tried to ease the back-breaking poverty of
most of its people, while our U.S. government waged a covert war against the
Nicaraguan people.
As we talked, I remembered images of mothers planting crosses
of their children taken, tortured, and murdered from public buses by the U.S.-backed Contra forces simply because their children dared to be teachers,
nurses, and doctors. It was a war of
terror… it was bullying at its ugliest.
And the bully won.
The U.S. basically told the Nicaraguan people in 1989… if you vote the Sandinista party in
again, we will continue the war... OR vote the
other party that we formed and choose that presidential candidate and we will stop the war. The Nicaraguan people, tired of war, cried "UNCLE."
This is not the only time that big, powerful nations have bullied small
nations, but it was the first that I saw with my own eyes and I was deeply, deeply ashamed of my country.
As the current U.S. government wants to slash domestic
spending and increase the defense budget for what is already the most powerful military in the world… one wonders if the bullying will ever stop.
As a Christian, Jesus taught his followers to not grab power, but to be servants. And though I know the
Christian faith has had, and continues to have, its bullies en masse… JESUS taught
us to be servants.
As a moral/ethical person, I truly believe there is no place
for bullying. For the Nicaraguan people,
the poor around the world, and for the security of the world… we have to resist the
bullies.
There is no place for bullying in a world of ethical/moral
people…no place…not in schools, not on the internet, not in businesses, and definitely not
in places of power.
-Kathleen
