School Bully Vs. Country Dictator

Gregory Heal
Ms. Cremin
AP English Language & Composition
16 February 2010
School Bully vs. Country Dictator There’s a thin line in what defines a bully and what defines a dictator. The same line is often crossed back and forth. By definition a bully is a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people and a dictator is a person who uses absolute, unrestricted control to rule over a group of inferior people. These two definitions are interchangeable between the two types of rulers. Both bullies and dictators are the supreme rules of the territory they’ve chosen to name theirs. They rely on and base their thoughts on Darwinist thoughts and systems of survival of the fittest.
The bully who lives to torment the other classmates, only goes after those who he believes will not be able to defend themselves against him. Easy prey. But of course the alpha lion needs his subservient pride to help him defend his territory. The pride is made up of companions that are just as power hungry as the bully but can’t overthrow him. These “gooneys” help the bully take care of the “light weight” or in other words the kids who the bully can’t take care of by himself. These followers are basically the bully’s lion cubs that, once they leave school, will go off to rule their own territory one day. Without them establishing his rule would be significantly more difficult to a near impossible. The dictator is just in a higher lever than the average school bully in the hierarchy of rulers.
Instead of being the alpha lion, a dictator is the saber tooth tiger. Just like the bully this dictator tends his pride to do as they are told in order to maintain control of his territory. The way to tell whether the person you’re looking at is a lion (bully) or saber tooth tiger (dictator) is that a dictator must be stronger. This is because he has so much more land than the bully. He has an entire country worth of land and also has a greater population in his territory compared to the bully’s school campus/minuet amount of people. The next difference that defines a dictator is that he needs more followers especially those that have more power than the average person in his country. This just ensures that he keeps the weak insecure and subservient, and the strong maintain on top of the power hierarchy. If the dictator’s followers decided to stop working and leave, dictator would cease to
exist. Even thought there are so many differences to the same concepts, there is one common ground where to both these types of rulers are exactly the same.
These deals with the reason that people choose to obey to them, which is fear. Why does a victim try to avoid the bully at all costs? Fear. It’s the fear of being attacked, robbed; even the simplest verbal abuse is enough motivation to obey and stay away from this tyrant. A person doesn’t rebel against a dictator is because “the last person that did vanished and was never seen or heard from again.” Unlike the school bully dictators have a tendency to take their rule and punishments a bit far and to the extremes. Instead of taking a kids lunch money when a kid looks at them a wrong way, a dictator will send him to the guillotine and put his head on the nation’s flag for all to see. Unless they’re part of these rulers’ personal inner circle of followers, they usually fear and despise them with a
passion. Bullies rule the school, but this rule is for “a limited time only”. These bullies run the school and the students in them, but then boom they’re kicked out of power and the door is slam behind them. This happens when the bully finally graduates (if he graduates) or when another bully arises and challenges the alpha lion for the territory and pride. On the other hand a dictator is a more semi-permanent ruler and much more difficult to take out of power. They stay at rule for long periods of time, because of the challenges the person against him must face; the courage it takes to rise against, and the punishment they would receive if they should fail. The only way to get a dictator out of rule is by replacing him or by death, both are nearly impossible tasks. A dictator has so many lines of defense to get to him, making both forms of mutiny strenuous and unbearable. It’s much easier to take a bully out of power than to take a dictator out. The parallels that exist and are created by comparing a bully to a dictator are unremarkable. Every fact about either side clearly resembles each other, just are achieved and followed through on two extremes. The bully is powerful at school and rules over a few hundred to a few thousand people. The dictator terrorizes a multitude of people that may contain a few million to a few billion people in it. The bully is the microscopy version of the entire tyrant organism that is the dictator.