Bullying is systemic in the United States. (Image: Ken Whytock)

by Mark Karlin, Editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout

So frequently the media and people in social and political leadership positions focus on reforming problems on a micro-level, when the problems are actually part of a larger institutional structure. For instance, take the repeated focus on school bullying as an issue. The authors of Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society — this week’s Truthout Progressive Pick, which you can obtain with a donation by clicking here — helped me understand that if we isolate school bullying from the larger US economic, military, political and cultural systems, efforts to combat it will be doomed to fail. Bullying in our schools is not an exception to our society; it is a consequence of it.

My interview with the authors of the book — Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass — will be published on Sunday on Truthout. In it, the authors trenchantly lay out the conundrum of trying to halt the societal context in which this odious behavior occurs:

• Bullying has been a means of controlling people, putting them in “their place,” for perhaps as long as there have been humans.

Click here to continue reading this article at Truth-out.org.