NOT just you and me but big and small nations burn their national fingers trying to befriend a bully! Over fifty years ago, President Nixon, quite a crafty man, and not just because of his Pinocchio nose, decided on something called ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ with a growing China.
Today as China owns huge areas of real estate in the US and has managed to get their products sold replacing American ones, we realize what the bully finally did as it made inroads into the American economy and even as the very virus that threatens the world, seems to have sprung from a Chinese laboratory!
The late Prime Minister Nehru received the same ‘stab in the back’ from China, and many say his illness and subsequent death came from a feeling of betrayal! Well, in the recent present, our own national leader must have felt the same, after hosting the Chinese leader in Mahabalipuram with much fanfare, and even beating the bongos in Peking only to have the bully, retaliating by first nibbling, and now eating huge chunks of Indian territory!
History shows the worst we can do is befriend a bully! Why do we?, it’s not that we believe we can change his nature to a more docile one, but in cozying up to him would help in being left alone. He does for sometime. But a bully feeds on weaker ones and anyone who cuddles up to him is considered available prey!
So how exactly do we handle a bully? Not like France which without much ado, succumbed to Hitler’s threats and allowed Germany to walk in, but like tiny England which fought back, even to the brink of defeat and finally won, against a monster!
And that’s what we have to do to a bully, stand up to it! Because what the bully isn’t used to is being confronted! When Britain did, America joined in and Germany was battered! But it isn’t only nations which bully, political leaders do so too for political gain! Most often it’s towards the weak and weaker sections of a national community. Trump did this when he tried to make the white majority into a country of bullies!
How he succeeded was to draw out the bullying spirit in people, and oh yes we all have a bit of it; remember how we all made fun in school of the child with a stammer or other physical problem? We did, till we learned compassion. And it is through this feeling of compassion we will be able to band together to handle bullies. When we are compassionate to the bullied, two things happen; we prevent bullying and we stop the bully from eventually bullying us! Stop befriending a bully..!
