Putin is flicking the world's eyeball right now
There are many reasons I’m no longer a teacher. Most of them are financial and educational leadership-based. I don’t blame kids when they’re allowed to be monsters. They’re kids. I was stupid when I was one, so I give them leeway. Plus, my humor is on their level. I blame the system that allows them to be monsters. Case in point, I can’t even convey in words the frustration when a principal—hands firmly tied by a superintendent and board who want to keep numbers and cashflow up—tells an exasperated group teachers they are going to give a bully another chance in the name of love and compassion.
This in the same breath as stating they have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. I guess that policy was formulated in Bizarro World, where “zero” actually means “an ever increasing and indefinite amount”. Were I to run a school (it’s coming, folks) I’d have an actual zero tolerance policy because I don’t worship money and wouldn’t put up with a board of directors who have to make their Benz payments.
See, you can patiently work toward breakthroughs with a problematic kid, a troubled kid, an abused kid, a struggling kid, an emotional kid, etc. But you can’t reason with the better nature of a bully. By very definition, a bully has no better nature. The work in the direction of a breakthrough is expulsion. Sorry, but it just is. If enough civilized, peaceful, educated, and wise people who are trying to build a small, ordered society put a bully out from amongst them, the bully might eventually learn that he/she is the one with the problem and needs to change. I would argue that you’re actually being loving to a bully when you cast him out of your company.
Boom, they work on themselves and building a personalized better nature. That’s when the breakthrough happens. Not with second, third, eightieth chances. And we’ve not even discussed the damage they can do to the lives of those they are bullying while you stay steady flossing second chances. Bullies only understand and can be confronted with force equal to or greater than the force they are imposing. Since teachers and principals can’t beat up children, they must use the tool of expulsion. Numbers and funding be damned.
I’d say we can heartily classify Vladimir Putin as a bully; just one with lots of guns and money and political power he’s not soon to relinquish. It’s clear he’s interested in Ukraine for a myriad of strategic and economic reasons. This is the third time (guess it’s the charm) he’s done it. I’m not saying I have all the answers and certainly not saying we should go to war with Russia without some extremely weighty and careful thought. I’m saying we should call up History for a chat and see what it has to teach us when men like this crash around sovereign national boundaries all bull-in-a-China-shop-esque.
What would Madam History have to do in order to get our attention and stop recycling her more horrible plotlines? Seriously, just let her know and she’ll go to the required lengths. She just asks you stop hitting snooze on the lessons she so meticulously laid out for us in such aesthetically pleasing fashion.
When I was twenty-eight years old I was served with divorce papers, manipulated by a samurai-level narcissist into thinking I was a monster, and found out four months into the whole horrible divorce process that my wife had been unfaithful to me with a female friend from church. Not only that, she had lied to me from the beginning of our relationship as to the nature of our sexuality. I won’t go into the gory details of my emotional journey, but I found out that year just how low a woman can bring a man, and the power of God to restore him.
Sometime in the same general epoch, I watched a Chris Rock special in which he posits that men like strip clubs not just because of the nudity on display. It’s because in strip clubs, women approach and chase men, and men are able to reject and choose them. This presents a reversal of dating, relationship, and sexual paradigms. Men tend to be the searcher and women tend to be the gatekeeper. So being in a strip club and turning down this one while accepting the other gives a man a sense of power. This is similar to the attention one gets while being a rock star, professional athlete, successful artist, millionaire, or famous celebrity.
Men who are altogether unremarkable and unable to achieve in other ways can just be a political leader. They can go the old-fashioned route by stealing their neighbor’s stuff and convincing enough people that God ordained they and their issue should rule, tax, seize, decree, and keep a harem of women. Or they can go the modern route by winning an election, consolidating power, increasing the might of their loyal and obedient military, rule, tax, seize, annex, lather, rinse, and repeat. Call them secular/atheist kings and have done. It’s happening all the time in so many places. One is forced to conclude it’s a proven formula. That and the fact that monarchies still (for some fool reason) exist to this day make me thankful to have been born in the USA. But I always say that under my breath in case a screeching leftist America-is-always-wrong-and-racist harpy is in earshot.
For you see here, we have elections. I’m not talking about wink-wink-nudge-nudge pardon my finger quotes as I say “elections”. Real, honest-to-God elections. Contested, argued, debated, litigated, protested, and sometimes even rioted over? Absolutely. But at least they are real elections. The protests and litigation are actually evidence to their legitimacy. People feel and are free to speak and litigate recklessly when something they don’t like happens. A man can’t centralize power, seize the press, jail political opponents, speak law into existence out of one side of his mouth and do the exact opposite out the other side without someone of even middling intelligence raising their hand and saying “Hey guy? Not cool. Like, at all”. Said person of middling intelligence also doesn’t have to fear being suicided for having raised their hand and posed some ethical questions.
We’ve got term limits, checks and balances, distribution of power, states rights, and all other sorts of marvelous goodies baked into the crust of this country which make life here not so bad at the very least. I even feel like I’ve got it pretty good most days. ‘Scuse me while I treat the lump on the back of my head from having been hit by a brick from the weak and effeminate throw of one of these aforementioned screeching harpies.
I vividly remember my dad describing Putin as a former KGB spook when he was first elected president of Vodkaland in 1999. My dad is a wise and discerning man who could predict someone who had made more than a little clandestine use of garrotes and bamboo chute manicures wouldn’t be sitting still and resting on his laurels in office very long. Sure enough, he’s bullying his neighbors because they have some stuff he wants more than them; a totally valid reason to launch an all-out attack. Circa 1980’s reboots and nostalgia art being all the rage nowadays, we can playfully wag our finger and chalk it up to him wanting to reset eastern European maps to the salad days of his youth.
I’ve got an inkling women know the power they have over men on an individual level. I think these unremarkable men seize power, resources, and money to a large extent so they can reverse that power and select their women. At the least, it’s a perk of the occupation of dictator. Hitler’s entourage and their groupies prove that supposition right. Don’t believe me? Putin’s been divorced since 2014 and unconfirmed reports say he’s got kids all over town. It’s hard to confirm rumors when the man the rumors are about controls the press. But let’s run with it because this is a blog and only a minor step down from journalistic news when it comes to wild speculation.
Putin figured he could roll into Ukraine, throw up a few gang signs, grab Ukraine by the wrist, bend its arm toward its face, and make it hit itself while he obnoxiously and nasally repeated that well-known bully mantra. Either that or place his palm on its forehead while it angrily swung its short arms at him while only hitting air. The Ukrainian people have other ideas and have shown that once again, an outnumbered and outgunned people with a righteous cause and nothing to lose are worth more man-to-man than an invading force simply following orders. So as the bully is flicking the rest of the world in the eyeball and daring it to take action and the poor people of a beleaguered land defend what is rightfully theirs, we might discern that History is circling the block. It does almost nothing but circle the block. Since we can understand that to be true, we can look at the historical response of good men to bullies like Putin and do our part.
Oh yeah, and fix the schools while we’re at it.
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Image taken from:
https://www.bbc.com/news/60705629
