Whose job is it to teach them a lesson?

Bullies are perennial. The scandal isn’t that they exist—it’s that we’re still not ready for them.

We keep trying to outsource bully-handling: to HR, to screenshots on socials, to courts, to time, to karma. Anywhere but here. And it still isn’t working.

Lesson-teaching is a commons problem we refuse to name.

The uncomfortable answer is us, in the moment. We can’t rely on “the room.” We have to rely on the people in it. If it’s a commons problem, the only people who can actually address it are the ones there when it happens.

Speaking up shouldn’t be so costly. There’s no simple answer, and we can’t look outside for one. We have to look within ourselves, and to each other. We have to trust each other again—and be worth trusting.