Editor’s note: This column makes a brief reference to suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, help is available by calling 988.

I read with interest Lisa Walker’s Viewpoints piece (“Bullying, not just a school issue”) in the Sept. 17 paper. I share her deep concern about bullying. Daily, we see the effects of the behavior defined as “abuse and mistreatment of someone vulnerable by someone stronger, more powerful.”

A few weeks ago, as Walker mentioned, a student at Keene Middle School died by suicide and on Wednesday, Sept. 25, SAU 29 in Keene held a community conversation about bullying.

A little further from home, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump sowed blatant lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, spewing caustic verbal violence that resulted in bomb threats to schools so that now parents are rightfully afraid to send their children to school. This affects all children in a school, not just racially or culturally targeted youth.

We have a former president seeking office again who literally employs the bully pulpit on a daily basis, and one only has to watch a recent U.S. Senate hearing on hate crimes where Louisiana Sen. John A. Kennedy bullied Maya Berry, the only Muslim and Arab-American witness present, in front of colleagues, the press and the grieving mother of Wadee Alfayoumi, the 6-year-old Palestinian American boy stabbed to death last year, to understand that we live in a culture of bullying, not belonging. In a culture of belonging, there would be no need for Senate hearings on hate crimes.

As a restorative practitioner, I have met with the superintendents in both SAU 29 and SAU 1, offering my services to co-create a culture of belonging, rooted in right relationship, replacing ineffective punitive responses to harm with a more-comprehensive restorative approach. As of yet, my offers have gone unheeded. The interest expressed, the reports commissioned and discussed at meetings I’ve attended in Peterborough about racially motivated bullying have not changed the culture.

That level of change belongs to all of us in the community to embody. As Vermont Sen. Peter Welch remarked in the Senate hearing, “…if we as a society can’t accept the collective responsibility that we each have for the well-being of one another, then it's not going to work.”

Bullying is not the result of poor parenting. Bullying is an embodied expression of a hierarchical worldview that steeps all of us in the misguided and deadly notion that some of us are inherently more valuable. We have a politics, a designed and built world and an economy reinforcing that daily. The eighth-grader who bullies a peer, the former president who bullies his opponents, the community member who bullies a recent refugee, all express a deeply embedded fear of losing power, status, and ultimately, belonging.

The way to counteract bullying is adopt a restorative worldview guided by the innate desire of human beings to be in right relationship. We are social animals hardwired to thrive in community, not isolation.

In “The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic,” Jillian Peterson and James Densley identify the importance of safety screening for trauma at the doctor’s office or in school as a first step. They note “years of defunding in education [that has] led to chronic shortages of social workers and psychologists in schools” and underscore the necessity of social-emotional learning. SEL is as important for parents, teachers, administrators and community members of all ages.

Myriad examples of public figures wielding power over the most vulnerable – and the exhausted principal, teacher or parent scolding a child -- illustrate the need for all us to engage in the inner work of self-awareness, self-compassion and healing.

As humans, we all seek acknowledgment of our pain, the violations to our dignity and our inherent worth. We long to belong, to know we matter. Eliminating bullying requires sustained collective effort to dismantle hierarchy and replace it with cultures of care where the guiding questions are “What constitutes right relationship and how can we support that?”

Leaf Seligman, a restorative practitioner and author of “Being Restorative,” retired from 27 years of college teaching last year. She lives in Hancock.