Bully

It started with a death, as these things often do. A quiet, shy young man committed suicide following harassment from a schoolmate. It was not the first such nor the worst, Yet it has led to too-little-too-late endeavors to keep it from happening again.
One of the biggest issues today in different sectors of society is bullying. In schools, in work,  even in some religious groups, anti-bullying is taken seriously and programs to prevent it or deal with it when it happens are increasingly common.
As a former victim of bullies when I was a boy in school, I can appreciate the sentiment to protect the people in this world who can't or won't fight back. In my case, it had a lasting effect on the way I live my life. But I suspect that, as is so often the case, deeper issues are not being talked about.
When I came home crying after some bully had verbally or physically attacked me, I was admonished to be a Man! Never mind that the bullies were bigger, stronger and more in number, the proper response was supposed to be: fight back! (I got too many lickings by trying.) So I learned that the proper response to a problem was violence, aggression. (Note: Aggression is not the same as Assertion!) And when I chose to find another, gentler way to deal with my problems, my opponents chose to stigmatize this as weak and unacceptable. Never mind that it plays a major role in my faith, they still could not accept the alternative of vulnerability. Ironically, these are the same people who claim to be Christian!
But there is still another issue here: too often the quiet young man who is the victim of bullies is seen as being gay (sometimes rightly so, sometimes not). And there are authority figures even today who defend bullying as merited as a way to deal with homosexuality. We will not go into the psychological issues of why a person secure in their own sexuality would find it necessary to fight off someone else's. The fact is that some today still follow that old mantra: be a Man!