I recently broke bread with my grade school bully.

He was big for our age, even in elementary. Through juniorand high school, he just got bigger and manlier and handsomer. Which made hismeanness all the more sexy. I tolerated his insults like a forlorn lover.

I emerged small but pudgy and wore my odd effeminacy like achip on my shoulder. As I grew out of my grade school “husky” jeans and into myphysical prime in adolescence, our paths further diverged. His toward sports, themilitary, and fatherhood, mine into poetry, economics, and scholarship.

He introduced me to his delightful wife and kids. We talkedfor a long time, drank a bit, and realized that despite our divergent paths,our present-tense didn’t include torment or jealousy or insecurity. In fact,our views of ourselves and views of each other have largely converged, as onemight expect, coming from the same hometown and meandering into the samepresent.

At dinner, he asked me, without irony, not to swear in frontof the kids. Together, we prayed grace over soft tacos and guacamole.

It was, in Teddy Roosevelt-lingo, a “Bully Time.” Back inTR’s day, that word meant the equivalent of today’s “awesome” or  1950’s “splendid.”  

“I suppose my critics will call that preaching,” TR said, “butI have got such a bully pulpit,” as he launched the power of the presidency tobe both a setter of mood and center of righteousness in the Progressive Era. Hisinfluence on the culture and on the ethos was immeasurable: it was intense: itwas awesome: it was bully.

Many POTUSes have led from that, awesome-bullypulpit: FDR’s Four Freedoms, JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner, Barry O’sAmazing Grace, Reagan’s City on a Hill. These pulpits exudedstrength and compassion and patriotism and unity; they straddled the parochialand the civic.

Since 1903 and along the linguistic way, we’ve seen anevolution 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.Since, this systemic attack on decency has been amplified by media andinfluence; it  crosses indiscriminatelybetween the virtual and the actual, as symbolic slings and arrows made way to proverbialsticks and stones which, in 2025, make way to very real bombs and bullets. Violencehas begat violence.

Last used in 2021 to incite an attack on the Capitol, thebully pulpit laid mostly dormant (uninspiring, at least) until 2025.

The bully pulpit of 2025, no longer a sanctuary, also desecratesthe Ark of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bible. Cruelty emanates fromthe political sycophants and Sadducees; false prophets come in sheep’s clothingonly to ravenously betray the First Americans’ sacrifices. And just as the awesome-bullypulpit was used to provide sanctuary, this habitually cruel-bully pulpitof 2025 has trapped the marginalized in the vestibule, locked the doors, andhas 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 and our allies and our immigrants andrefugees who’ve historically looked proudly and longingly to America as abeacon of democracy and freedom. We witness the decay of communion, the bloodof our forebears spilt like cheap wine from gilded chalices.

And through this lens, although I did not vote for it or forimmigrant roundups, or for the attacks on equity and inclusion, or fordismantling of our core institutions or for outright grift, I have feignedcontentment. I have been hoping that the echoes of the awesome-bullypulpit would reverberate from the back of the Sacristy to the Nave and drownout the habitually cruel current keepers of that pulpit. In my  faith and hope, I have let the bullies off. Ihave been complicit by my faint voice and I am sorry.

And as I listen back to President Reagan call out from his awesome-bullypulpit to, a "tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans,windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmonyand peace,” I wonder if I was not the bully back in grade school: my scaldingwords ripping through the vulnerable in my midst, even as those shakedowns hidmy own insecurities: the jealous glares and sanctimonious teasing of those whowere different—often differently better: the full lack of empathy that camewrapped in my own “giftedness.”

I recently broke bread with the kid I bullied in gradeschool and he let me off, “kids will be kids,” he said reassuringly as I hidtears behind chips and queso in front of his delightful children. He—a, still handsome,now-brittler aging former athlete, veteran, and grade school teacher—gently askedme not to swear in front of the children. We said grace together over soft tacosand guac.

We all have our perceptions and excuses vis-à-vis  “the other”. He was mean, I was mean. We werejealous of each other. We were twelve, we were sixteen. We were cruel, but nothabitually so and not from the seat of the highest power in the world. 

I love him, today, like a brother and it hurts my heart thatI caused him pain. 

How we, as a congregation of Americans in a world that needsus to be splendid once again, recover when the bully pulpit reclaims itsawesomeness (and it will, because America is bigger than this bully) willrequire such grace as my grade school friend showed me—an Amazing Grace(a’la Obama) that, “saved a wretch like me.”