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Don’t laugh at me

  You may never have heard of Robert Fuller, but if you are close to the median age of Sonomans, you may be familiar with Peter Yarrow, famously a third of the ’60s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary.

  Why do we ask?

  As we bring Bullying Awareness Month to a close in Sonoma, both men’s names emerged in important conversations on the subject. Fuller is a former president of Oberlin College – one of the premier liberal arts schools in the Midwest – and he’s the author of “Somebodies and Nobodies,” and “All Rise,” books that promote “the  politics of dignity,” and an end to what he calls “rankism,” the perennial human practice of the strong pulling rank on the weak.

  Fuller spoke at the Sonoma Community Center on Tuesday night, concluding with the warning, “You can’t stop rankism with more rankism. You can only cure rankism with dignity. Bullies, too, must be healed. It’s not enough to just repress the bully … you have to heal the bully. Do that and you have stopped war.”

  Fuller’s presence opened a link to the work of Peter Yarrow, whose recent life has been devoted to an organization he founded in 2000 called Operation Respect, which has developed free curricula and multi-media tools for classroom use to combat bullying. It is built around a profoundly simple and poignant message embedded in a popular song, written by Allen Shamblin, that hit number two on the Billboard country charts in 1998. It’s called, “Don’t laugh at me,” and the lyrics leave nothing much else to say.

 

I’m a little boy with glasses

The one they call the geek

A little girl who never smiles

‘Cause I’ve got braces on my teeth

And I know how it feels

To cry myself to sleep

 

I’m that kid on every playground

Who’s always chosen last

A single teenage mother

Tryin’ to overcome my past

You don’t have to be my friend

But is it too much to ask

Don’t laugh at me

Don’t call me names

Don’t get your pleasure from my pain

In God’s eyes we’re all the same

Someday we’ll all have perfect wings

Don’t laugh at me

 

I’m the cripple on the corner

You’ve passed me on the street

And I wouldn’t be out here beggin’

If I had enough to eat

And don’t think I don’t notice

That our eyes never meet

 

I lost my wife and little boy when

Someone crossed that yellow line

The day we laid them in the ground

Is the day I lost my mind

And right now I’m down to holdin’

This little cardboard sign ... so

 

Don’t laugh at me

I’m fat, I’m thin, I’m short, I’m tall

I’m deaf, I’m blind, hey, aren’t we all

 

Don’t laugh at me

Don’t call me names

Don’t get your pleasure from my pain

In God’s eyes we’re all the same

Someday we’ll all have perfect wings

Don’t laugh at me.

 

  Shamblin wrote the song after his daughter was teased at school for having freckles. It has now entered popular culture, there’s a hip-hop version by Baby Jay and it’s become the anthem for Operation Respect.

  Some will call it saccharine and overly simple, but taken to heart, what else is there to say?