Recess! Media

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That’s Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin with their moving song, “Don’t Laugh at Me,” on a CD included in their book by the same title, illustrated by Glin Dibley from Tricycle Press in Berkeley, California. This book is part of a larger, national endeavor — the Operation Respect “Don’t Laugh at Me” Project that makes video and curriculum materials based on this song available free of charge to teachers and others who work with children. A portion of the sales from this book go to the important efforts that Seskin, Shamblin, Dibley and many others are making with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary who founded the Operation Respect program. In his afterward to the book, Mr. Yarrow calls the song “an anthem of a movement to help children find their common sensitivity to the painful effects of disrespect, intolerance, ridicule, and bullying; actions and exchanges, which, in the hands of adults, become the basis for active racism, war, and other devastating dysfunctional behaviors. ” The purpose of Operation Respect is to help plant the seeds that will change these behaviors, that will transform a school, a summer camp, a community, a whole culture. For as the song makes so eloquently clear, the wounds and the healing involve us all.

Brief sound clip