You may have read reviews of the newly released movie, Bully, focused on bullies in our children's lives . Don't these reviews seem to be overlooking a very obvious connection - the leaders in the political area of today's US of A?
Political Leaders
Local politics via Our Mayor blog, as in today's post. Big Cheese Stands Alone is meant to expose bully behavior. And this is just one of more than a dozen posts with clips all listed here. These are a fraction of the stories citizens could share throughout the dozen years Jerome Stocks has served on city council . As editor, I'll state that a clear mission is to show clips of the council warts and all and especially the voices not covered by the news or the kinds of things a compliant press doesn't write about or expose. For this reason we can't get candidates LIsa Shaffer or Tony Kranz to participate directly in the blogs, but we will continue to show clips of them, copy from their public websites, facebook entries and other public sources because we consider them the alternative to crony behavior from the mayor and the council majority and their friends and funding sources.
The movie, Bully, is a place we all might learn about a pathology that allows this mean behavior to thrive.
When vicious behavior is rewarded in every facet of our culturally elite's personal, social, recreational, business and political lives without accountability and scrutiny; it is no surprise we raise up a new crop of bullies each and every year. But, leaders who are mean in their very characters are not going to be providing us meaning of any value if the message is, I've got mine - the hell with you.
Remember This Revelation?
The scene is Harvard Business School, 1975. Bush is captain of his class' basketball team, which is playing the Class of '76 team.Bully 2.0
The game was tight. The other team's captain, Gary Engle went up for a shot. Bush slugged him — an elbow to the mouth, knocking him to the parquet. "What the hell are you doing?" Engle remembers saying. "What, you want to get into a fistfight and both of us end up in the fucking emergency room?" Bush just smiled.
Moments later, at the other end of the court, Engle went up high for a rebound and felt someone chop his legs out from under him. Bush again. Engle jumped up and threw the ball in Bush's face. The two went at it until two teams of future business leaders leapt on their captains, pulling them apart. Engle, angry and vexed by what had happened, began wondering why the hell Bush would have done what he did. He lost his composure, and his team lost its leader.
A few years later, Engle...bumped into Jeb Bush....Engle, a Republican contributor, had thought from time to time about his game against George. Nothing like that had happened to him before or since. This was his chance to get a little insight about it. He told the story. Jeb kind of laughed, Engle recalled. "In Texas, they call guys like George 'a hard case.' It wasn't easy being his brother, either. He truly enjoys getting people to knuckle under."
He truly enjoys getting people to knuckle under. source
In a TV interview this month, Mitt Romney's wife Ann insisted, "There's a wild and crazy man inside of [Mitt Romney] just waiting to come out." How wild and crazy is he? Well, when he was a teenager at boarding school in 1965, he was so crazed by a fellow student's slightly long hair that he organized a wild mob that held the boy down while Romney cut off the offensive locks, as his victim wept. [. . .]A bully is essentially a coward. Only when he can outnumber, outweigh or otherwise overwhelm or secretly attack does he strike. We never need to accept this behavior. And it is vital we don't back down and sanction behavior by saying we don't want to be negative, we don't want to be rude or otherwise equivocate with unacceptable demonstrations. Although tolerance is an ideal worth striving for in so many areas, it doesn't belong in this arena of human rights and indulging predators or sociopaths.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s
look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
"It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said [Thomas] Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.” ... "It was a hack job,” recalled Phillip Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious." source
Bullying at home when mom and the kids are smacked around or treated with contempt? That is a whole other story for blog writers attuned to this with resources to share. We invite contributors.
