Bully Time

BULLY TIME

Read this essay as originally published at Watermark.com

I recently broke bread with my grade school bully.

He was big for our age, even in elementary. Through junior and high school, he just got bigger and manlier and handsomer. Which made his meanness all the more sexy. I tolerated his insults like a forlorn lover.

I emerged small but pudgy and wore my odd effeminacy like a chip on my shoulder. As I grew out of my grade school “husky” jeans and into my physical prime in adolescence, our paths further diverged. His toward sports, the military, and fatherhood, mine into poetry, economics, and scholarship.

He introduced me to his delightful wife and kids. We talked for a long time, drank a bit, and realized that despite our divergent paths, our present-tense didn’t include torment or jealousy or insecurity. In fact, our views of ourselves and views of each other have largely converged, as one might expect, coming from the same hometown and meandering into the same present.

At dinner, he asked me, without irony, not to swear in front of the kids. Together, we prayed grace over soft tacos and guacamole.

It was, in Teddy Roosevelt-lingo, a “Bully Time.” Back in TR’s day, that word meant the equivalent of today’s “awesome” or  1950’s “splendid.”  

“I suppose my critics will call that preaching,” TR said, “but I have got such a bully pulpit,” as he launched the power of the presidency to be both a setter of mood and center of righteousness in the Progressive Era. His influence on the culture and on the ethos was immeasurable: it was intense: it was awesome: it was bully.

Many POTUSes have led from that, awesome-bully pulpit: FDR’s Four Freedoms, JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner, Barry O’s Amazing Grace, Reagan’s City on a Hill. These pulpits exuded strength and compassion and patriotism and unity; they straddled the parochial and the civic.

Since 1903 and along the linguistic way, we’ve seen an evolution of the word, “bully,” to mean what it means today: the misuse (misuser, as a noun) of power to repeatedly harm or control a vulnerable victim. Since, this systemic attack on decency has been amplified by media and influence; it  crosses indiscriminately between the virtual and the actual, as symbolic slings and arrows made way to proverbial sticks and stones which, in 2025, make way to very real bombs and bullets. Violence has begat violence.

Last used in 2021 to incite an attack on the Capitol, the bully pulpit laid mostly dormant (uninspiring, at least) until 2025.

The bully pulpit of 2025, no longer a sanctuary, also desecrates the Ark of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bible. Cruelty emanates from the political sycophants and Sadducees; false prophets come in sheep’s clothing only to ravenously betray the First Americans’ sacrifices. And just as the awesome-bully pulpit was used to provide sanctuary, this habitually cruel-bully pulpit of 2025 has trapped the marginalized in the vestibule, locked the doors, and has made this most American of places into a totem to habitual cruelty.

From awesome-bully to habitually cruel-bully, we witness a betrayal of our citizens and our allies and our immigrants and refugees who’ve historically looked proudly and longingly to America as a beacon of democracy and freedom. We witness the decay of communion, the blood of our forebears spilt like cheap wine from gilded chalices.

And through this lens, although I did not vote for it or for immigrant roundups, or for the attacks on equity and inclusion, or for dismantling of our core institutions or for outright grift, I have feigned contentment. I have been hoping that the echoes of the awesome-bully pulpit would reverberate from the back of the Sacristy to the Nave and drown out the habitually cruel current keepers of that pulpit. In my  faith and hope, I have let the bullies off. I have been complicit by my faint voice and I am sorry.

And as I listen back to President Reagan call out from his awesome-bully pulpit to, a "tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” I wonder if I was not the bully back in grade school: my scalding words ripping through the vulnerable in my midst, even as those shakedowns hid my own insecurities: the jealous glares and sanctimonious teasing of those who were different—often differently better: the full lack of empathy that came wrapped in my own “giftedness.”

I recently broke bread with the kid I bullied in grade school and he let me off, “kids will be kids,” he said reassuringly as I hid tears behind chips and queso in front of his delightful children. He—a, still handsome, now-brittler aging former athlete, veteran, and grade school teacher—gently asked me not to swear in front of the children. We said grace together over soft tacos and guac.

We all have our perceptions and excuses vis-à-vis  “the other”. He was mean, I was mean. We were jealous of each other. We were twelve, we were sixteen. We were cruel, but not habitually so and not from the seat of the highest power in the world. 

I love him, today, like a brother and it hurts my heart that I caused him pain. 

How we, as a congregation of Americans in a world that needs us to be splendid once again, recover when the bully pulpit reclaims its awesomeness (and it will, because America is bigger than this bully) will require such grace as my grade school friend showed me—an Amazing Grace (a’la Obama) that, “saved a wretch like me.”