The street stretching in front of the President’s Home, on the campus of the University of the Ozarks, serves as a bus stop for local school students. Pickup days gather a crowd of different aged and diversified youngsters. The other morning a police car was parked beside the bus. A benign interloper, I watched intently as two unsmiling officers spoke to attentive, fear-frozen little faces inside the bus. Curious, I waited before walking to my campus office to ask the policemen what had happened. They shook their heads in quiet frustration before one responded to my question.

“Several parents have reported incidents of bullying on this bus and at the elementary school. We were asked to speak to the students, to give them a lecture. I guess that’s our job.”

In light of that episode and some other ugly incidents on the national scene, I offer five recommendations about adolescent bullying, a serious problem. As a lifelong educator, I find acts of intimidation—student against student—to be particularly troubling.

1 Speak Out

Can you imagine the outcries of national shame from liberal commentators if George W. Bush had accepted a peace prize by advocating for war and announcing his right to launch wars of aggression? What an embarrassment that would have been!

But Bush would have made such a speech with fewer troops in the field, fewer mercenaries in the field, a smaller war budget, a smaller military budget, bases in fewer nations, the imperial powers of the presidency less firmly established, and -- of course -- worse pronunciation.

And isn't that what matters? The current president is smart and belongs to a different party, so when he continues and escalates wars we despised, wars we made great sacrifices to try to end, well either the wars must be better than we thought, or escalating them must be the really super smart way of ending them. After all, the other war mongering party calls the president a foreign-born socialist traitor. Except that they loved his speech in Oslo.

The epic fight over carbon emissions is barely the tip of how we survive.

Mother Earth demands that fossil/nukes be transcended. This green-powered leap defines our technological, economic and ecological survival.

But climate chaos and financial ruin do not stand alone. Green gadgetry aside, we don't get to 2030 unless we confront:

The power of the corporations;

Social justice and ballot-based democracy;

Ending waste and war;

Growing food that's truly organic;

Empowering women while harmonizing population growth.

1) Blunting carbon emissions alone will never solve our climate crisis. Nor will it be done without taming the most powerful institution humans have ever created: the global corporation.

Right now no mere government, or gathering of them, can seriously challenge the networked clout of globalized industry and finance.

Corporations claim human rights…and the military clout to enforce them…but no human responsibilities. Their sole mandate is to make money. Human and ecological considerations are ultimately nil.

That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions.

Some highlights:

"There are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I."

Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize … and then making a false case for war:

"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences."