A few years later, when bullies started packing guns, knives, and computers, the conventional wisdom became dangerous as well as wrong. By then, bullied kids returned with an automatic weapon and wiped out the cafeteria. A cycle of violence had been created.
And now we have this ur-bully in the White House again, who showed up and began suing people, firing them, arresting them. Some of the same pundits who never really believed in his staying power are now suggesting that we simply roll ourselves up and wait it out. You know, just keep your head down. It's only four years, after all.
Well, consider that the worst advice possible. Donald Trump has loosed too many demons, already out of his control -- from unhinged individuals just waiting for a voice to send them out into the night to vigilante militias awaiting a cause to give them purpose. They now think Trump has their backs (although he's capable of turning on anyone). In his all-(un-)American world, there are no safe havens and no certainties. Those who think the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 is Trump's Mein Kampf had better be guarding against his version of the Reichstag fire that gave Adolph Hitler his critical boost. If you think chaos is assured, the next step may be to build a bunker or hop on a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk interstellar rocket to Mars.
A New Mindset
My own feeling, though, is that the next step is to develop a new mindset.
Something like this: We are the guerillas in this war, the Yankee doodle irregulars who scandalized the British redcoats in 1776 by firing at them from behind trees. We're the Viet Cong who planted poisoned bamboo spikes. Sound ugly? Perhaps you'd rather echo Michelle Obama's "When they go low, we go high," which certainly didn't lead to victory in the 2016 presidential election. Get real. Going lower is merely a tactical decision. It doesn't mean you're giving up your principles, no less joining the other side.
Resistance begins with "embracing the suck" (old military slang for acknowledging the morass we're in). Part of such an approach is understanding that, in opposing Trumpworld, you could get a torn pocket here, a lost job there, maybe even risky confrontations in the street. But without resistance, count on one thing: it will only get worse.
Old Bullies Beget New Ones
The bullies who clapped when I beat Willie are the progenitors of the unruly mob of blue-collar losers and white-collar wonks, proud thugs and Heritage Foundation nerds who, 60 years later, showed up at Trump rallies. By the time Donald sprung from jail those of them convicted of trashing the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it was clear that they had always been the enemy. In Willie's time, while we were afraid of them, we also considered ourselves superior to them and that smug, elitist view only grew.
Now, we find ourselves the asymmetrical warriors, the underdogs.
What about those classmates who watched Willie and me? They never tried to rescue me. I never found out what went through their minds when the worm finally turned. Did it make them ashamed or make them fight back against their own bullies?
The equivalent of those classmates, the bystanders of our moment, are the lost souls in this battle. They grew up to be the Democrats who fought among themselves for ideological bragging rights, or the Republicans who gave in, followed the money and power, voted the bastards in, and now hide behind them. They have functionally become bullies, too.
And Willie? The time has passed to empathize, play shrink, understand an unhappy boy. To hell with him and Donald Trump, too. We've certainly read enough about his troubled childhood, nasty dad, cold family. The question now is: What do we do before he does us all in?
Three Things to Do
First, shut up and listen.
In retrospect, it's easy enough to see how the shrewd, disciplined plotters, before and during the Trump years, stocked the judiciary and the state legislatures, the school boards and town councils with radical right-wingers. And it's no less easy to point out that the rising prices that disrupted the lives of the working and middle classes made Trump seem like an all too viable option for so many of us. All that should have been as clear as after-school bullying. But it didn't seem to alarm enough of the media and so many of the political bystanders who looked down on the bullies and the bullied and thought they were safe.
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