Skip to main content

We Don't Want to Play With You


WE DON'T WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU

I

"We don't want to play with you."

How odd, I thought, but that is what he said.

Even a brand-new three-year-old
Pauses
When someone tells him that:
Especially someone who is happy
To be three
At a playground in the sun.

"We don't want to play with you."

"We"?

It was settled before they had come to play
Before they said it:
"We don't want to play with you."

Little brown boy
I want to cry.

II

I thought of a song from
Rodgers and Hammerstein's
South Pacific:

"You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught!"

We . . .
We don't want to play with you.

We don't know you.
You are just a little boy
Happy in the sun
Running around
Glad to be where the other kids are
But we don't want to play with you.

"You've got to be taught to be afraid
. . . of people whose skin is a diff'rent shade."

III 

When Barack Hussein Obama
Was elected Black to the White House
The Lost People who lost
Met and decided what to say

The economy had come tumbling down
So they had to pick their way
Through the rubble
The banks had left

Free enterprise has a high cost
Government had to do something

"What," David Obey asked the Republicans,
"do you have in mind for a stimulus?"

"I'm sorry," the kid in the playground said,
"but leadership tells us we can't play."
"We can't play."

We don't want to play with you.


Comments

  1. Su EvansApril 1, 2015 at 5:08 PM

    Always along the way
    We learn to respond to those in our way
    who think we are other than they.
    Too early we learn that others are a part of this life.
    Other is good in learning to care.
    Tough as it is, strong you will be, building the world that we elders have dreamed of for oh, so long before you were born.

    WE want to play, we other kids,
    to romp and laugh and hoot with delight.
    Curiosity and eagerness will take you far.
    WE want to explore the very sun and air with you.

    So know that many are waiting to play and laugh and explore.
    You will carry the day, Little One.
    Surrounded with love you are indeed, even from those of us you will never meet.
    Empathy and caring will be your new growth.
    Our future depends on you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Conrad RøyksundApril 1, 2015 at 11:50 PM

    Thank you for your tender response.
    And tough and strong he will have to be,
    he, and those who are our future.
    I do believe he is what it takes.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more