Vote for a Bully?
Would you vote for a bully for President?
We all know bullies and, as parents, we worry about when (sadly, not if) our children will have to deal with them and how they’ll manage. While we all navigated our way through our own individual middle school and high school torments, these days it feels like bullying behavior is talked about more openly because there are more places for it to happen — bullying is now not just on the playgrounds and in school hallways, it’s online, too.
For most people, being bullied or even having been a bully is something that we live through and outgrow on our way to adulthood. That’s not the case for everyone, as we’ve seen with stories of how mean girls sometimes turn into mean moms. But if someone running for President of the United States has a bullying past, is that a fair factor to consider when deciding who to vote for?
Recently, reports have surfaced about GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney being the ringleader in a disturbing prep school episode in which he, and others, tackled a classmate and cut off his hair. Romney claims to have no recollection of what some have called “a prank,” but several witnesses have described in great detail an event that would today be considered an attack on another student.
As the story goes, a new student with long hair that had been dyed blond came to the boarding school Romney attended. That look apparently violated the school’s code of appearance and infuriated Romney. So, according to an account in the Washington Post, Romney headed up a “prank” to pin down and cut the hair of their new classmate, who also had been ridiculed “for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality,” while he screamed for help.
I found that all pretty disturbing, though I wasn’t sure what upset me more — the very detailed description of the event or the fact that so many people have a vivid recollection of what they called a “vicious” attack, but Romney claims to have no memory of it because he supposedly did a lot of “dumb things” in high school.
So is this story something in the distant past that has no bearing on what kind of person Romney is today? Or is the episode that’s been described so horrible, that it’s fair to ask whether it’s reflective of a larger character issue to take into consideration when casting our votes in November?
Whether it influences anyone’s vote, there’s another reason I’ve been mulling this over. Our sixth-grade daughter heard about Romney’s high school episode and was shocked that someone who wants to be president could possibly have been so cruel and hurtful to someone different than him. In our 21st century world where bullying seems like it’s reached epidemic proportions, our kids spend significant school time talking about how to treat one another and what behavior is acceptable — and what isn’t.
As I said, we’ve all had our less-than-stellar moments in our lives, both as children and adults. And I’m sure there’s plenty of childhood baggage to go around for all the other candidates who were trying to become the Republican presidential nominee and probably even for President Barack Obama, himself. But I still have to wonder — if you want to be President of the United States, do some actions, regardless of how old the person was at the time, cross some sort of threshold of disqualification?
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If we can never grow up and away from our mistakes as children and teens, where’s the incentive to learn and mature and become a better person?
I think there is plenty about Romney as an adult for voters to evaluate without opening up the doors to “the really dumb things we did in high school”. And let’s not forget that once this Pandora’s box is open, it’s legitimate to apply this to every candidate from now on.
When I was in school, parents and teachers remedy for bullying was to basically tell us to figure out how to deal with it on our own. They thought this was the right thing to do and was teaching us something, and I am a lot younger than Romney, so I would imagine that his generation wasn’t anymore 21st century enlightened.
Our kids are soaked in bully awareness and character training from daycare on. Their perception is just as influenced by that as me and my peers were by the relative lack of adult interest when we were young. It’s not helpful to compare b/c we simply can’t make the past conform to today’s standards by being outraged. The “good ole days” were what they were and people reacted within the boundaries just like we do now. It’s nice to now that things do change but if I were Romney, I would feign memory problems too b/c thiss story is a distraction (why has it come up now and never before?) from the much more relevant reasons why Romney shouldn’t be POTUS.
You make excellent points, Annie. I’m sure this was part of all the opposition research that has been put together on Romney. As our kids are part of a bully awareness culture, I do wonder what our kids, who are old enough to be paying attention, might think of this story?