By Judie Brown
Whenever I hear or read of a news story involving the problem of bullying, my husband always reminds me that, as the youngest of four boys, he was bullied from the moment he could walk! I suppose that, because brothers will be brothers, in retrospect this is rather funny and is likely to be expected in a house full of boys. But that was then; this is now.
In today’s cultural climate, however, we are not talking about the taunts of a sibling. In fact, today, bullying and the actions many educational institutions are taking to prevent it make headlines with regularity. The reason is perhaps best defined by the National Crime Prevention Council, which reports, “Bullying has become a tidal wave of epic proportions. Although bullying was once considered a rite of passage, parents, educators, and community leaders now see bullying as a devastating form of abuse that can have long-term effects on youthful victims, robbing them of self-esteem, isolating them from their peers, causing them to drop out of school, and even prompting health problems and suicide.”
Undoubtedly there should be no place in a civilized society for brutality among classmates, on college campuses, or anywhere—including the family, which is often scarred beyond belief by abusive authority figures or inhumane acts perpetrated against those who are helpless. For example, could you ever have imagined a time in America’s history when commentators would be addressing a mother’s spoken desire to terminate the lives of her disabled children?
Or could we have ever imagined news reports about men who do not want their girlfriends or wives to be pregnant and subsequently brutalize them or even kill either the preborn child or both mother and child?
With all this violence and abuse being discussed, it is amazing that none take note of the underlying cause of this increasing exhibition of brutality. The fundamental problem that has aggravated human aggression, pitted the strong against the weak, destroyed families, and turned American values upside down is abortion. The violence that concerns so many in America today got a jump start when the Supreme Court chose to permit the ultimate child abuse by ignoring the result of the act of abortion in deference to the rights of the mother.
This deadly war is waged daily pitting mothers against their innocent preborn babies, pitting the strong against the weak, and pitting truth against fabrication. And sadly the lies have won the day and thus the acts that result from a callous disregard for human life go on and on, becoming ever more threatening not only to the expectant mother and her child, but to the society in which we live.
As long as America condones the act of abortion, and her citizens believe that it is nothing more than a choice a woman has a right to make, we will witness ongoing dastardly deeds of hatred perpetrated against those who are less fortunate—including the poor, minorities, children, and the infirm. What has happened to our national sense of justice, our concern for the weakest members of the human family? It has evaporated in an era of tolerance and delusion.
It seems to me that if, for example, our president can create a special agency to address atrocities abroad, he could most certainly address the horrors imposed on the innocent in the womb that he knowingly persists in condoning right here on American soil.
Why does America have a bullying problem? Because we are the bullies!
Judie Brown is co-founder of the American Life League, a grassroots Catholic pro-life education organization committed to the protection of all innocent human beings from the moment of creation to natural death.