How do you stand up to a bully? When we were children in grammar school and the big held back bully kid bumped us with his protruding belly and demanded our lunch money, this is the question that hounded us.

The same question is ever present today with the likes of worldly bullies, such as the dictators Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and Ali Husaini Khamenei. But just as in grade school when, whimpering and wet-eyed, our trembling sweaty hand gave up the lunch money, our response to dictators today is to appease, to “make friends” — in essence, to cower in submission.

We all want to be friendly. Yet, while true friends are on the same level, the dictator slavishly looks down on all others. Is this what we should look forward to in life, being grinded underneath the boot heel of our favorite tyrant?

It must be said, then, that if President George Bush was not a righteous enough leader to stand up to Saddam Hussein, then some other country’s leader should have stood up instead. But if such an announcement were to be made at a United Nations meeting, it would be as if time itself had stopped with all the myriad country’s representatives’ hindquarters frozen in their seats.

It is true that the United States may have based their overthrow of Saddam on inadequate reasoning and a history of unwelcome meddling in Iraq’s affairs, but where were the other leaders of the world in voicing their revulsion towards Saddam’s brutal regime?

The silence of our timidity is deafening and like mice we tiptoe and scamper around the feet of the world’s bullies, never correcting their poor behavior just as we cannot correct our children, our spouses, and our bosses in our personal lives.