The United States has officially transitioned from a scrappy group of underdog colonists fighting for freedom to a nation of bullies, intent upon forcing their vision of the country and the world onto anyone who disagrees, preferably with violence and some sort of almost sexual pleasure in causing suffering onto others. It is, perhaps, time to try again.

When the Founding Fathers gathered for the Constitutional Convention and planned to enumerate the laws of their new country, they faced Great Britain. A nation of bullies whose government agent thought they knew better what was best for the people of the colonies and were happy to enforce it through violence. How times have changed.

We now see law enforcement agents assaulting citizens not even with the excuse of a duly authorized law, passed by a morally bankrupt Congress, but simply upon an Executive Order from the President of the United States. When another chief executive passed orders regarding immigrants one half of the nation was duly outraged and feared exactly the sort of behavior they now endorse. We are, as a whole, a nation of bullies.

It is not that Republicans want to enforce their will upon Democrats alone. When the shoe was on the other foot it was actually the same. The powers that be would have you believe they are on opposite sides of this issue when they are behaving in exactly the same totalitarian way. Democrats happily enforce their version of the nation upon unwilling citizens and Republicans, with glee and hate that crosses the line into evil, do the same to citizens opposed to their vision.

It is my opinion, sad as I am to conclude such, that we have crossed Rubicon. Too high a percentage of the people of our nation have forgotten human decency. The majority of our people do not care about freedom, about liberty, about individual choice. They relish imposing their will upon those they deem wrong. We are now a nation of bullies.

It is when government agents take to the streets to violently enforce the dictates of an executive that has been given far too much power by a complacent people and a weak Congress that We the People are forced to rectify matters.

Perhaps I am wrong, maybe we have not yet reached a point where too high a percentage of people care more about forcing others into compliance than they do about freedom and liberty, regardless of the political party. Hopefully, I am wrong. What I see is a nation of bullies. A nation of people gloating and preening in revolting pleasure as their political foes are assaulted and have their freedom stripped from them.

The gloaters, on all sides, are apparently not empathetic enough to see how a nation of bullies is also a nation of victims and, eventually, not a nation at all.

Tom Liberman