Do Not Bet on the Bully

Mitt Romney’s apology for his leadership in the bullying episode of his classmate John Lauber at the prestigious Cranbrook School in 1965 Michigan because of Mr. Lauber’s egregious sin of effeminacy is hard to swallow.  It is quite hard to think that Willard Mitt Romney was not bold-face lying when he professed not to remember the incident that five other witnesses had no trouble recalling.  Mr. Lauber later told one of the witnesses how horrible that incident was and that he had never forgotten it.  It is too bad that Mr. Lauber is not alive to corroborate it further.   The Washington Post, however, vetted its sources well enough for me.  I believe Mitt Romney remembered it vividly but lied about it as he so easily lies on other issues.

We know the "Leave it to Beaver" world of Romney’s youth was a myth. The story behind the 1950's and early sixties as I experienced it was one of ebullience ONLY IF one was white, Anglo Saxon, good looking, rich and male. Mitt Romney was surely all of those.  If one was African American, a woman, disabled or a homosexual then we know what the reality of that time was. Suicide was not uncommon.  It was a brutal era for those who did not meet the brutal criteria for acceptance into that special prestigious club of which Romney was a member in good standing.  Certainly there were plenty who did not possess the rigid qualities to gain admittance.

It has taken decades and hundreds of Oprah-like media shows for millions to admit to either their own frailties or their own different-from-the-norm self which was a threat to all those who bullied them but more of a threat to the very person who experienced it and was terrified of that walk home alone at night.

We have come a long way since 1965 but not long enough that the Phoebe Princes and Matthew Shepards either took their own lives or had them taken because of the bullies of our time. It is just another reason among many that the empty suit and unsympathetic self of Mitt Romney should NEVER come near the Oval Office and why I pray every day that he does NOT!