America First
At dinner tonight
our eighth-grader repeated
how all the kids just love
their Patriotism teacher.
She asked if we knew
that for centuries
people have misjudged
that Samaritan as good.
Each evening she seems
more and more suspicious
of our baffled looks,
of our needing to have explained
something so self-evident
as the moral that only someone
alien to our way of life
would help a victim
who probably deserved
a worse beating than he got.
William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.