LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Playground bullies foreshadowed leaders of today
My mother taught me never to make fun of others. She drilled this into me throughout my early life.
There was certainly a lot of that going on during recess at my elementary school. Children can be cruel to one another and the hurt from childhood taunts can stay with you. I was self-conscious growing up in the early 1960s in my homogenous, white middle class Midwestern neighborhood because I was not only one of a handful of Jewish children at my school, but I was the only one with immigrant parents who had accents.
My mother grew up in eastern Poland during the gathering storm of the Second World War and arrived in America in 1947. My father escaped from Vienna in 1938 at the age of 15.
My school friends didn't know the persecution that my parents had faced. That my mother and her family were saved by a Catholic neighbor who built an underground shelter where they hid for a year from the Germans. That my father, then living in Columbus and attending Ohio State, joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence officer and returned to the theatre of war when he was just 21. All my schoolmates knew was that my parents were different. That I was different. Most of them were accepting. It always came down to the crude bullies.
I thought of my mother's mantra recently as I read about Georgia Sen. David Perdue's mocking comments of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris at a recent Trump rally. “Kah'-mah-lah? Kah-mah'-lah? Kamala-mala-mala? I don't know. Whatever.” When outcry ensued, Perdue's spokespeople said the Republican senator simply mispronounced Harris' name, and that he meant no disrespect.
Perdue has spent three years in the Senate with Ms. Harris. How could he not know how to say her name? Perdue was doing what my mother taught me, as a child, was wrong.
I immediately thought of Robert Fulghum's classic book of essays “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” I thought about how, for nearly four years now, we have listened to open mockery of others by our highest officeholder. Just days after Perdue's insult, our president made a point of mispronouncing Harris' name at a Florida campaign rally. His verbal abuses arrive in daily tweets, we can see and hear them on news clips.
In kindergarten, Fulghum learned to play fair, to say you're sorry when you hurt somebody, to clean up your own mess, and, when you go out into the world, to hold hands and stick together.
Don't we want our children and grandchildren to be exposed to grownups who show respect and kindness, acceptance and empathy? Is that too much to expect from a president and national leaders who are making daily decisions that affect the country we call home?
Linda Kass, Bexley