In the 1920s, long before he was a poet, before he was a conscientious objector, before he had kids of his own, William Stafford was just a kid living in an era when bullying and racism and all sorts of cruelty existed out in the open.
One day, young William came home and reported to his parents that two young black kids were being taunted at school. His parents had one question for him: “And what did you do, Billy?”
Notice that the elder Staffords didn’t dismiss what was happening as not their kid. Nor did they rush to the phone to call his teachers. They did not yell. They did not make assumptions. They used the incident as an opportunity to emphasize a core life teaching: We are responsible for each other. We cannot sit on the sidelines while bad things happen in front of us.
One can imagine they were hoping to hear an answer that revealed their son had absorbed the lessons they’d been trying to teach in their home his whole life. Like any good parent, their question was a test to see if he understood how virtue and duty and kindness and human decency must be practiced to be perfected. And one can only imagine how they felt when they heard his reply . . .
“I went and stood by them.”