By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Fred Rogers spent decades asking children each day, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” It was an invitation to engage and understand. It was an offering of friendship and a call to build community. These are values lost on Donald Trump.
Within a month of the Trump Administration announcing its “zero tolerance” policy on May 7, 2018, Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez was shot in the head and murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Rio Bravo, Texas, Trans woman, Roxana Hernandez, died while in ICE custody, Marco Antonio Muñoz, committed suicide while in custody after being separated from his wife and three year-old son, and an estimated 1,300 (the number grew to 2,500) children seeking asylum were forcibly separated from parents and guardians at the border and placed in makeshift government detention centers, one being a desert camp in Tornillo, Texas reminiscent of a WWII Japanese detention center.
Though Trump ended forcible separation after a country-wide outcry on June 20th, a September 13th report from USA Today counts 416 children are still separated, and an October 3rd article in The Guardian, reports the Tornillo detention center has not only not shut down as expected, but continues to grow, currently detaining an estimated 2000 minors.
Almost concurrently with “Zero Tolerance,” Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary celebrating Fred Rogers, a man who dedicated his life’s work in public television programming to upholding the respect and healthy development of children, was released in select theaters. The film’s director, Morgan Neville, is clearly aware of the relevance of Rogers and his television program, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, in today’s America. Within the first 30 minutes of the documentary, we see how the show’s radicalism was prominent from its 1968 debut. Amidst the Vietnam War, the first week’s storyline follows King Friday XIII’s decree to build a wall around the Neighborhood of Make-Believe in order to keep out all the “changers,” but I doubt Neville predicted how far Trump would go for “the wall” by the film’s June 2018 release.
Or how far he would continue to go in his campaign to “Make America great again.” (Talk about being afraid of the “changers.” This week Trump demonized Globalism and proudly proclaimed himself a Nationalist. That’s a pretty big wall he’s building.)
Won’t You Be My Neighbor is a documentary chronicling the making and popularity of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, but it also acts as an anecdote to hate. Over the 134-minute runtime, we are treated to many clips of its star, Fred Rogers, sharing his insights on the vital importance of love, feelings, and children. An ordained minister, Rogers wielded television production as a tool to spread his core message, love your neighbor and love yourself.
Through out the film, audiences are reminded of the many times Mister Rogers helped our nation’s children cope with personal tragedies such as divorce and death as well as public tragedies such as the Vietnam War, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and the explosion of the Challenger. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the Challenger were directly addressed on the show, and the documentary shares actual footage of an assembly hall full of high school students waiting to see their teacher, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, take off into space. A tough moment in the film—so much so, I wonder why it’s included—we watch the students’ faces change from elation to shock as they witness their teacher die in real time.
Born in 1980, I was in Kindergarten and watched the Challenger explosion live in my classroom like many other children of the day. A child of the Cold War, I remember having an ongoing fear of war and regular nightmares of my home being attacked by Russian paratroopers. I also remember the calm I felt while watching Mister Rogers each day. There was something in the way he welcomed me into his home and went about changing into a sweater and sneakers. It was never rushed. It was routine. It was ritual.
This is why generations of children continue to look to him for comfort even today.
By the time of the 9/11 attacks, the film recounts how Fred Rogers is retired but is asked to reprieve his beloved roll in order to once again give solace to the children. Through interviews, it’s speculated by this point in the man’s life he is tired and perhaps at a moment of hopelessness. What can he say when the suffering is too big?
But that doesn’t stop the need.
Early in the summer, when I became bombarded by the news of “Zero Tolerance” and downtrodden by the face of a wailing child on a dirt road, a toddler alone in a courtroom, the recording of a child battling to remember an aunt’s phone number, I took myself to the movies hoping to once again be comforted by the man who told me time after time, it’s OK to feel. During the film I cried many times, mostly good cries, the kind of cry that helps me to feel human again. I was also entertained, but like an episode of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, the film invited me into moments of reflection and meditation.
A highlight of the documentary is when we as the audience are asked to remember someone who once helped us. In true Mister Rogers fashion, we hear his voice instructing us to quietly think about this person, to picture him or her, and as we do, we watch different people from Rogers’ world—Joanne Rogers, his wife, Nick Tallo, the show’s floor manager, and François Clemmons who played Officer Clemmons—silently do the same. Some of those on the screen are glassy-eyed; some are smiling; all are thankful for the opportunity to remember a special individual.
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This week the Administration took steps to make our trans brothers and sisters nonexistent and targeted a caravan of refugee families traveling from Honduras as criminals and terrorists. In a time when we wake every single morning fearing what new atrocity the Administration has brought to our front doors, we need to be reminded of where to find the good.
Mister Rogers, after the 9/11 attacks instructed that in times of chaos we can “look for the helpers,” but some days they feel impossible to find.
Toward the end of the documentary, Junlei Li Ph.D., co-director of the Fred Rogers Center in Pittsburgh, PA, says the question is not “What would Mister Rogers do?” but “What are you going to do?”
Right now in our country, there is a trans person frightened for their life. Right now, there is a young child traveling by foot across Mexico with her family without any kind of security for what tomorrow will bring. Right now, there is a young man locked up in a desert prison all alone and wondering when he might see his family again.
It’s OK to feel scared. It’s OK to feel. And if you are having a hard time finding the helpers, remember that you can look to yourself.
Trump and his Administration thrive off the belief that only a few select types of people have earned or deserve rights, but Mister Rogers believed, “You don’t ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you.” Won’t You Be My Neighbor is a needed reminder that love has the power to change the world, but “love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle.”
It’s not easy, but love is never meant to be. Who will you love? How will you help?
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), a 2016-2017 Steinbeck fellow and former Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner. She has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and The James Franco Review and is a cofounder of Women Who Submit.