MAY 15, 2025 -Today on my way back from Little Switzerland, I noticed the playground rules—10, if you disregard the overlap between “Smoking is prohibited” and “Tobacco use is prohibited in the presence of youth”—posted at a local city playground. My personal opinion is that the 10 commandments could be conveyed far more effectively if they were consolidated into a single rule and presented in 12-inch, bright red font followed by an exclamation mark: something along the lines of NO MISBEHAVING!
I’ve noticed that prominently displayed playground rules are a “thing” in America. This phenomenon shouldn’t surprise us, since . . . well, wasn’t the rule of law always a cornerstone of American democracy?
Up in the resort town of Hayward, WI the closest settlement to the Red Cabin and Björnholm, the local parks department posted so many rules and regulations, you’d think Hayward was a Democratic stronghold, not the very MAGA hometown of Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy[1]. A large display board was crowded with an exhaustive series of “no-nos”; I mean, “NO-NOs!” In addition to “No smoking” and “No drinking alcoholic beverages” were a slug of other prohibitions—so many, in fact, that they could have been consolidated into the single rule, “JUST SAY ‘NO’!” or better yet, “NO FUN ALLOWED!”
Then there’s the kid’s playground next to the elementary school in Chester, Connecticut, where the usual set of 10 or 12 general rules is supplemented by an entirely separate set of injunctions applicable to swings—“No [this],” “No [that],” and my personal favorite, “No jumping out of swings” (which ironically, is exactly what my wife was trying to teach our then eight-year-old granddaughter to do at the very time when I was reading the rule).
I now find these signs hugely ironic. They were crafted and posted to maintain civic order and encourage proper public behavior, yet in today’s world they seem quaint and naïve, given the Trump Autocracy’s contemptuous disregard for the rule of law. On the playground, no spitting, smoking or swearing. In the Oval Office and ICE arrests and detentions, it’s a whole different ballgame. No, not a ballgame but a real world, real time nightmare.
In case you haven’t noticed or you haven’t been personally acquainted with anyone directly affected by the ICE roundups; in the event you yourself haven’t been caught up in an ICE operation, the Trump Administration’s open defiance of the law—of the Constitution and ruling by the Supreme Court—puts this country beyond a Constitutional crisis and into the middle of autocratic rule with frightening implications for you, for me, for everyone.
How much longer before the unashamed defiance of the rule of law at the very highest level of governmental leadership smashes all respect for rules at the ground level of a local playground and at every level of authority in between? And how much longer before the ICE arrest, detention and deportation of non-citizens with a legal presence in the U.S. leads to the same treatment of full-on American citizens who fall into an expanding number of “undesirables”: 1. People with “foreign sounding” surnames; 2. People not carrying “Real” I.D.s; 3. State court jurists protecting individuals against illegal seizures by ICE (See Wisconsin!); 4. Outspoken critics of the regime; and 5. Unnaturalized foreign-born adoptees?
The next small step by the Administration will bring big ramifications for the country. Already we’ve seen a person consigned to a prison in El Salvadore—by mistake and without due process. Since Abrego Garcia, there have been other cases of people mistakenly arrested, detained and deported—and without due process. All of which ought to remind us of the warning issued by Martin Niemöller, a distinguished Lutheran pastor in Germany during the Nazi Era. Originally a Nazi sympathizer, he wound up as one of its harshest critics among the clergy and paid for his opposition by eight years in concentration camps from 1937 to the end of WW II. After the war he published his warning in the form of a poem called, “First They Came.” No doubt you’ve read it or encountered some variation of it, but the warning warrants regular review and consideration. In its entirety, it reads:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
In today’s world, each of us is now duty-bound to . . . speak out before it’s too late; before all that’s left of the rule of law in this country are the playground rules.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] During the summer after my second year of law school, I worked for Sean Duffy’s father, Tom Duffy, a lawyer in Hayward. We became good friends (he and his wife Carol attended Beth’s and my wedding at the Björnholm five years later), and I wound up spending gobs of time over at the Duffy house, where Tom and Carol’s family of 12 kids (I kid you not) were constantly coming and going. Sean was nine at the time. Early every Saturday evening, Tom and I would drive from Hayward to Mount Telemark—a bit over 20 miles—to stash water for the next day’s road run over that same distance. Often Sean and a couple of the younger kids would go along for the ride. Our “running pack” consisted of Tom, Carol, Kevin Duffy (one of their older kids, who was my age and also in law school), the fiancé of Tom and Carol’s oldest daughter, and a couple of other runners from Hayward. We then all ran the Paavo Nurmi Marathon in Hurley, WI on the Michigan (UP) border, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, the temperature at the start being 85F. Sean would go on to become a champion log-roller—a logical pursuit given that Hayward had achieved a degree of international fame for its annual hosting of the Lumberjack World Championship, for years captured on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Hayward naturally produced a number of accomplished log-rolling athletes. The log-rolling is what opened the doors for Sean’s subsequent TV career, which he later leveraged to get himself elected as Congressman (Republican) for Wisconsin’s Seventh Congressional District. As we all know, Trump likes people who “look good on TV.”
