“I went to private school. Believe me, it was hard! I have more experience in battle than any of you stupid soldiers.”

Mean people suck.

Yes, they do.

I learned this in school. I learned it as a student, way back in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but it was truly brought home to me as a teacher of elementary school kids.

Mean people just plain SUCK.

NO one wants to be friends with the mean kids. It is not OK to make fun of people. You can’t call people names.  It isn’t acceptable to laugh at people for their mistakes, or to tell everybody that you are better than everyone else.

You can NOT lie.  This is a basic rule of elementary school life. You can’t just make stuff up and say it with a straight face in the hope that that will make it true.  Lies are lies.

Every elementary school child knows that you can’t pretend that the rules don’t apply to you.  It is not a part of acceptable social behavior to say, “I can do this, but you can’t.”  It is bullying at its worst to tell people, “You have to follow the law, but I get a pass because I’m special.”

I know, after my many years of teaching, that children are smarter than this. Children always recognize a loud mouth when they see one.  They know what the bullies sound like.

No child in the world, I think, would believe that a woman is within her rights to get married four times to four different men, and still tell a gay couple that her “God” won’t allow her to let a gay couple marry.   Kids would see the hypocrisy right away.

“Jesus doesn’t like you. He told me this morning over waffles.”

And I don’t believe that there is a child anywhere who would find it admirable or acceptable for a grown man to call others “stupid”, to say that they are “rapists and thieves”.  I think that the kids I’ve taught over all these years would know what to do when someone made up lie after lie about other people.  I am sure that they would recognize the problem if a classmate claimed that he had just as much expertise as someone else, even though he’d never played the sport in question.

I think that the kids I know would take one close look at Donal Trump and roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and leave him sitting all by himself at recess.  I think that they would listen to Kim Davis for about ten seconds before deciding that she was just plain out mean.

Mean people suck.

They do.

They don’t deserve our support, our recognition, our celebration or our votes.  Mean people deserve our scorn.