A civics class is supposed to teach how citizens should treat one another. Dave Bonta's two-couplet poem borrows that title and offers something closer to a field report on how people actually behave. It opens with an instruction, "see how people other others," as if a teacher were pointing at a specimen. Everything after that is the lesson: a quick, unsettling look at how contempt spreads and what people think it buys them.
The first line does its work through grammar. "Other" is normally a word for a category, the people who are not us. Here it becomes a verb, something people do. The line then repeats the word in its familiar role, so that "other others" has a verb and a noun made from the same raw material. Hearing the stutter, we can almost feel how the act produces its victim: first you "other," and then "others" are what you have. The language is performing the process it describes.
The second line pushes the same trick further. "The news guns gun for our kindness" can be read as "news guns" (the media as weaponry) that "gun for," or hunt, something. Noun and verb sit side by side, and the rhythm lurches with three heavy beats in a row: NEWS GUNS GUN. It sounds like staccato fire, a mock-heroic jolt in an otherwise flat, conversational line. The target is also unexpected. We might expect the news to go after secrets or governments, but the poem says it goes after "our kindness." The "our" matters, because the speaker is not standing outside the crowd. Kindness also carries a buried link to "kin" and "kind," as in belonging to the same kind. If so, the first line's othering and the second line's attack on kindness are one subject seen from two sides, since to other someone is to deny that you are of a kind with them.
The second couplet changes both the tone and the sound. "As if they would buy time / by the help of a watchmaker" is softer, almost fable-like. The phrase "buy time" is a dead idiom meaning to delay or stall. Setting a watchmaker beside it brings it back to life in a comic way, because a watchmaker repairs and measures time but cannot sell you any more of it. The image suggests a muddled bargain, a hope that the right craftsman or machinery might give extra hours. Read against the first couplet, it implies that people other one another, and the news feeds on that, in a vain search for safety, certainty or a pause in the bad news. The tools are simply the wrong ones. The phrase "by the help of" instead of the usual "with the help of" has a slightly stiff, off-kilter sound, and the poem seems comfortable leaving that oddness in place. "They" is also left unclear. It could be the people doing the othering, or the news guns themselves, and the poem does not settle it.
The construction is minimal. There is no punctuation, no capital letters, and no end rhyme, but the sound is carefully managed. "Buy time by" repeats the long *i* three times in quick succession, a small chime that makes the line feel almost proverbial. The stresses are heavy and clustered in the first stanza and looser in the second, which ends on the long, trailing word "watchmaker," so the poem seems to wind down like a mechanism. Both the second and third lines begin with "as," which means both "while" and "like." The news is gunning for kindness *while* people other others, and the behavior is *like* trying to buy time from a watchmaker. The absence of a final full stop leaves the thought open-ended, as though the situation is still going on.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. It makes a political observation without a slogan or a villain. The argument is carried by word-forms, by nouns turned into verbs and verbs turned back into nouns, so the reader sees ordinary language being bent into weapons. The ending asks a question it does not answer: if time cannot be bought this way, what is all the othering for? Because it is so short, it works like a riddle that stays with you after you have solved the grammar.