We’ve said before that bullies eat, drink and marry too much. They choose grudges as their companions. They get others to do their dirty work. They’re weak and totally replaceable. “Don’t get mad, get even,” is written in their high school yearbooks and on their mirrors.
They reside in the highest order of politics and the lowest level of high management. They react with anger, and in their quest to hurt you, they pull out their deep-fried guns, aim for you, and shoot themselves through the boot.
They are everywhere.
There are other kinds of humans, too. Ones who try to pay back the air they use on this planet. Ones who will share what they have and feel odd buying anything for themselves.
Those are the people who stand up to bullies. Elizabeth Warren. Harriet Tubman. Greta Thunberg. Katharine Graham.
Probably some men, too.
Here we are in the teenage stage of 2020, and it’s interesting, maybe horrifying, that a stock market plunge and a curious virus have both captured our attention in the past couple of weeks.
We know that everyone’s job really does affect others, even when greed damages society. We know that our thoughts affect our health. We know that poverty affects our outlook.
We know lots of stuff, but we don’t know what to do about a virus that comes from someone else’s nose, mouth or eyes and enters our nose, mouth or eyes and finds its happy place at the bottom of our lungs. There it takes prisoners, called cells, and bullies them.
We don’t know how to get rid of it, which scares many people in many lands, and that somehow means it’s time for the stock market to tank. Murphy’s Law.
The stock market, whether we’re invested in it or it’s even ethical, affects us. Corporations, whether we work for one and make oodles of dollars or one that has caused weak agriculture, affect us.
And so does sunlight. So does “listening to the moon and the stars,” as someone wrote somewhere in this paper this week. So does music.
Our strength is appropriate to our time. Things change. There was a time when American children were undernourished. After that childhood obesity became epidemic. We learned from that, and now kids are looking pretty great and are free with their smiles.
There was a time when farm women made dresses from feed sacks. So feed companies started making pretty patterns on their sacks. Simple acts of attention made awful things bearable.
We simply don’t win all the time. Ask the Razorbacks, the Buffalo National River or David Petraeus. It happens.
And besides the scary virus and the collapse of everything financial, Dublin cancelled its St. Patrick’s Day parades.
Not here! Eureka Springs will still celebrate St. Patrick’s March 17 death.
On March 14.
Bully!