I recently broke bread with my grade school bully. I remember he was big for our age, even in elementary school — and through junior and high school, he just got manlier and more handsome.
That 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, jealousy or insecurity. In fact, our views of ourselves and 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 1950s’ “splendid.”
“I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit,” TR said as he launched the power of the presidency to be both a setter of mood and center of righteousness in the Progressive Era. His cultural influence 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, compassion, 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. This systemic attack on decency has been amplified by media and influence, crossing indiscriminately between the virtual and the actual — with 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, our allies, our immigrants and our 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 Reagan call out 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 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 in front of his children. He — a still handsome, now 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.” We were jealous of each other. We were 12, we were 16. We were cruel, but not habitually so and not from the seat of the highest power in the world. Today, I love him like a brother and it hurts my heart that I caused him pain.
How we, as 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.”
Jason Leclerc (@JLeclercAuthor) is an essayist, poet, economist and author of two published collections. He shares his work online at PoetEconomist.Blogspot.com.
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