Melinda's comments are truly amazing:
> Melinda: Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism. On a trip to South Asia, I met a desperately poor mother who brought me her two small children and implored me: "Please take them home with you." When I begged her forgiveness and said I could not, she said: "Then please take one." . . . When I talk with the mothers I meet during my travels, I see that there is no difference at all in what we want for our children. The only difference is our ability to give it to them.
This is such a tremendously important message that I don't think you can even hope to accurately perceive the world without really internalizing it.
The other day, someone told me a story. He was working maintenance in an apartment building, and went into a unit one day. Inside the unit, he saw a couple passed out on the couch, and a baby screaming in his crib. He went over to the baby, and saw a cockroach crawl out of his diaper. The diaper was stuck to the baby's skin. He called 9/11 immediately, the police came, and the building fired his maintenance company for not going to the building management first. This wasn't South Asia, it was here in the U.S.
I heard that story, and then thought about how our daycare e-mails me daily an itemized list of the time of every diaper change and whether it was wet and/or BM. I thought about how unfair it is that she started life with a leg-up, from the hospital where she took her first breath, and yet how I'm totally driven to give her every unfair benefit I can ("you know honey, we could afford private school from pre-K if we budget carefully"). Intellectually, we want life to be fair for everyone, but being a parent means having this overwhelming urge to clear the path ahead for your offspring, burning down the forest if you have to.
I'm certainly not going to send my daughter to an inner-city public school to make a point. What gets to me is our inability as a society to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance, and speak about this issue honestly outside of graduation speeches. To talk about traits like intelligence and patience in terms of what they are: winnings in the genetic lottery, rather than as the result of moral virtue. To acknowledge that "equality of opportunity" is a vicious fiction and understand that not as a call to any particular political ideology, but as a fact of the universe that we must reconcile with any political ideology.
> Melinda: Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism. On a trip to South Asia, I met a desperately poor mother who brought me her two small children and implored me: "Please take them home with you." When I begged her forgiveness and said I could not, she said: "Then please take one." . . . When I talk with the mothers I meet during my travels, I see that there is no difference at all in what we want for our children. The only difference is our ability to give it to them.
This is such a tremendously important message that I don't think you can even hope to accurately perceive the world without really internalizing it.
The other day, someone told me a story. He was working maintenance in an apartment building, and went into a unit one day. Inside the unit, he saw a couple passed out on the couch, and a baby screaming in his crib. He went over to the baby, and saw a cockroach crawl out of his diaper. The diaper was stuck to the baby's skin. He called 9/11 immediately, the police came, and the building fired his maintenance company for not going to the building management first. This wasn't South Asia, it was here in the U.S.
I heard that story, and then thought about how our daycare e-mails me daily an itemized list of the time of every diaper change and whether it was wet and/or BM. I thought about how unfair it is that she started life with a leg-up, from the hospital where she took her first breath, and yet how I'm totally driven to give her every unfair benefit I can ("you know honey, we could afford private school from pre-K if we budget carefully"). Intellectually, we want life to be fair for everyone, but being a parent means having this overwhelming urge to clear the path ahead for your offspring, burning down the forest if you have to.
I'm certainly not going to send my daughter to an inner-city public school to make a point. What gets to me is our inability as a society to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance, and speak about this issue honestly outside of graduation speeches. To talk about traits like intelligence and patience in terms of what they are: winnings in the genetic lottery, rather than as the result of moral virtue. To acknowledge that "equality of opportunity" is a vicious fiction and understand that not as a call to any particular political ideology, but as a fact of the universe that we must reconcile with any political ideology.