I Like this Kid's Anger...
Properly channeled, he is going to do something with it one day. Something like this:
"This is my response to presidential candidate Ben Carson," Yusuf Dayur began in a calm, soft voice.He needs to work on perseverance, perhaps, and get some American history under his belt*, but he's got the delivery down, won't let the personal challenge pass, and that anger will serve to drive him, I'll bet. Wherever he ends up.
The 12-year-old Eden Prairie, Minn. middle-schooler paused. What followed next sounded like a politician responding to the president's State of the Union address.
In two minutes and 20 seconds, Yusuf spoke about race, religion and slavery. He also announced his future candidacy for president of the United States.
"Mr. Carson," he continued, sitting on a couch in his home, "what if someone told you that you can't become president because of your color? What if someone told you that you can't become president because of your race? What if someone told you can't become president because of your faith? And that's what you did to me."
Yusuf, who was born in St. Louis Park, Minn., then talked about his desire since age 2 or 3 to become president. When he was in preschool, he said, "I would brag to my little, tiny friends that I'm going to be a president one day."
Then he collected his thoughts and became a bit sentimental. "You basically shattered my dream," he told Carson, "because you said that a Muslim person cannot become president."
"I will become the first Muslim president," he said, "and you, you will see that when I become president I will respect people of all faiths, all colors and all religions. It doesn't matter if they're Jew, if they're Muslim, if they're Hindu... if they're atheist. It doesn't matter if they're Christian, it doesn't matter if they're... if they still believe in Greek and Roman mythology, I don't care. They're still human beings and we should treat them with respect."I think he'll be a local-control guy, if his comments on contemporary politics are any indication. For example, in the upper Midwest temperatures, young Yusuf has learned the fat in cheese is a good thing.
"And obviously," he told Carson, "you don't know what respect is.
"My name is Yusuf Dayur," he concluded. "And guess what? I don't care what you say because I will become president."
In an interview with MPR News, the Somali-American boy breathlessly talked about complex issues ranging from Iran's nuclear deal to First Lady Michelle Obama's push to make meals healthier in the federal school lunch program.
"They took away the cheese in our cheeseburgers and made them hamburgers instead," he said about the first lady's school lunches. "I really missed that cheese."
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Yusuf Dayur, center, with his family -- sister Yusra, mother Shukri Abukar, brother Yasir, sister Yasmin, sister Tasneema and father Hassan Mohamed -- outside their home in Eden Prairie. |
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* Many American-immigrant children, those whose ESL state achievement tests I've graded, seem to come away with the idea that Martin Luther King freed the slaves... Go figure. (I think in the primary grades, students take the tests in the spring, after they have been saturated with the MLK/Abraham Lincoln, 1-2, Jan.-Feb. push in the curricula, instead of a more balanced, chronological history lesson that might make more timeline sense to absorbing minds.)
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