Why aren’t people nice, good and kind?
It sounds like a stupid question, and probably is. Still, you’d think that, having outgrown the feral competition of our “nasty, brutish and short” phase, we’d have evolved in a kinder, gentler direction — as we have, of course — but here’s a statistic, courtesy of the 2007 Kandersteg (Switzerland) Declaration Against Bullying in Children and Youth, that challenges all complacency on that score: An estimated 200 million children and youths worldwide are bullied by their peers. The spread of cyber-bullying since then probably already makes that look like the good old days.
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