Bullying
Whether it is a Republican debate audience booing a gay soldier or Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attack on a female Georgetown law student or Newt Gingrich’s salvos at the poor, bullying has become boilerplate. Hiss and taunt. Tease and intimidate. Target your enemies and torture them mercilessly. Maintain primacy through predation.That paragraph is from a powerful New York Times column by Charles M. Blow, titled Bullies on the Bus, about the incident of the 68 year old bus monitor in upstate New York who was bullied by a group of 7th grade boys began to taunt her. As you can read in this news article today, the resulting video Making the Bus Monitor Cry, captured by a student on his cell phone, went viral and outraged people. If you have not seen the video, be warned: you will be disgusted. Fortunately, as both Times pieces make clear, enough people have been outraged that over $500,000 has been raised on behalf of the bus monitor.For many of us, such bullying on a bus is not new. Anyone who has seen the movie Bully has seen the young student getting bullied, horribly so. Several posts here, by Laura Clawson on the front page and by me in a diary, explored that movie. Those of you at Netroots Nation got to meet one of the students in that movie who was bullied.
I want to focus on the column by Blow, because he is putting it in the context of our political culture, and i think