Are our politicians bullies?

Being bullied or being a bully is not only a part of the growing up, in my view, but a bully also tends to continue being one throughout life; only his tactics change. What is bullying? I visited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully and their definition of bullying is “Bullying involves the tormenting of others through verbal harassment, physical assault, or other more subtle methods of coercion such as manipulation. There is currently no legal definition of bullying.”

A bully when entering adult life is likely select a profession in which they can find ways to assert power; finding suitable jobs in policing, the military, prisons, perhaps even law or politics. It is through politics that one can achieve the highest levels of power in our society today.

Historically the world’s leaders have been politicians and many of them have been dictators who have ruled through bullying. In Canada, we have democracy and an elected government, many of the politicians have law degrees, and so our preferred form of bullying comes out in the handling of our rights, changing or creating new laws.

The true nature of our politicians is revealed in election years, they create an election platform to manipulate our opinion to get our votes, and they verbally assault other party leaders through advertising. In parliament, they stand up and verbally harass opposing politicians to discredit them. How can we allow this to happen?

We discuss ways of handling bullying in schools as we find it very upsetting when we hear about our kids engaging in such behavior, but we are not saying much when the political parties go at each other. This week, the Harper government has launched TV advertisement to discredit Stephan Dion as a leader, somewhat ineptly using out of context clips to cast doubts on his environmental platform. Harper, as the face of the conservative party, has allowed his party to show their true face, they are worried about losing their power so they act like a bully to keep it.

Canadian must stand up against such childish schoolyard antics and vote for a party that is concerned about our welfare, our environment, and our health. We cannot allow this to happen over and over again; we need to grow up and stand up for issues that affect our society. We need to see through the negative bullying and through our vote, support the party that is genuine, open to change and actually deal with real issues.