ACHTUNG: This is not a fair and balanced story. It is an editorial by the editor.
“A bowl a day keeps the bullies away.” — TV advertisement in the 1970s for Apple Jacks cereal.
It was sad to see, hear and read that Hopkins school district parents passed along complaints about bullying to the Board of Education last Monday evening.
It was sad because bullying is one of society’s oldest scourges, and virtually nothing effective has been done about it for so long. The problem persists despite such public relations programs as “Be Nice” and “OK 2 Say,” which have done about as much as the War on Drugs has in preventing or halting substance abuse.
The biggest reason we are losing the war on bullies and the war on drugs is that we don’t really understand the problem and we don’t really want to handle in a manner that solves it. We react to incidents with emotions and with misguided notions that have lasted for far too long and we seem to despise non-violence.
As the columnist Coleman McCarthy once wrote: “If violence really solved problems, what a peaceful world we’d have.”
We will never solve our problems with bullies until we come to grips with the awful truth that our culture not only permits bullying, but it also encourages and exalts it.
The best example is that many of the same people who complain about bullies in the schools elected perhaps the most famous bully on the planet president of the United States. Even before he became president, I regarded Donald Trump as a blustering non-physical bully.
My understanding is that Trump has used his wealth and power to get what he wants. His rhetoric too often is threatening and self-congratulatory. And we love it. We see him as a winner who will fight our opponents with bullets, aggression and military and police might rather than with wimpy negotiations.
Americans seem to love it w
hen we go in somewhere and kick butt, but don’t say much when an ex-president (Jimmy Carter) goes into Haiti to diffuse a potentially bloody situation by persuading a dictator to leave his homeland. That happened 20 years ago with little notice.
We Americans so often laud the exploits of military snipers, leaders and soldiers, along with athletes who don’t just perform amazing feats, but drive the enemy into submission. And woe be unto to those who are defeated and then widely regarded as losers.
Looking back at our rich history of preferring violence as a means of settling issues, I suspect bullying actually is hard-wired into our DNA. It seems our attitudes are formed very early and most somehow hang on to them as long as we live.
If it’s true we’re just a higher form of animal, as Darwin suggested, we understand behavior of chimpanzees, apes, lions and tigers and bears, and just about any other mammal to notice that “the weakest link” so often is identified and weeded out in that nasty game of survival of the fittest.
A lion stalking a herd of zebras will seek out what he or she believes to be the weakest and most vulnerable and select 
it for dinner. The weakest in a pride of lions doesn’t usually live very long.
Some studies of human behavior suggest our interactions at early ages cause us to reject what we perceive to be the physically weak and identify with the strong as a matter of self-preservation. We can turn so easily against those among us we see as weak, different or lacking in desirable physical qualities. Those weakest links, once identified, often are bullied in a variety of ways or cast aside once they enter junior high age, or even earlier.
The most common advice for bullying victims is to fight fire with fire and give the assailant a good smacking. There are two resultant problems — you can get kicked out of school for fighting and you stand a good chance of bringing physical harm to yourself.
There is a grain of wisdom to fighting back and I’ve seen a few cases in which it has seemed to work. But most often, it appears to be a problem without a solution.
Many of us then want school teachers, principals and staff to protect our children at risk and we customarily are not satisfied with their efforts. Yet we go home and cheer on Trump making fun of a handicapped reporter or making crude remarks about women. And we continue to love our sports heroes, even if we find out they beat their wives.
As Walt Kelly said so eloquently long ago in a “Pogo” comic strip — “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
