When the music ends, since it is usually playing from a music library or a streaming radio station, Ess expects another piece to begin playing:
“‘nother hong coming!”
She says it to Mykala, she says it to me. It’s very sweet. I do not recall her once getting upset when we couldn’t make another song start playing. It might be the only thing Ess feels particularly patient about right now. Our very toddlery toddler.
If you attempt to explain why you should vote to help others while exempting morality and selflessness (which can quickly veer into the tautological) from your argument, you’d be left with an argument from selfishness:
Why are you “owed” a police force, why are you owed a fire department, why are you owed clean water or electricity, why are you owed laws that protect your ideas through patents or copyrights, why are you owed anything you enjoy through a civil society that makes your life demonstrably better than a libertarian wet dream like Zimbabwe?
I’ll tell you why. Because as a civil society we’ve decided what’s a part of the commons, that which we can not individually afford but whose existence we recognize, serves us all. I have news for you: my life is better and more secure if you and your kids aren’t bankrupted by medical bills. My life is better if everyone has safe streets and food. My life is better when the next generation is well-educated to continue the prosperity of this great nation. No one is owed, but it is a gift we give to each other as citizens and the price we pay to enjoy the blessings of our forefathers. And it is the height of hubris to presume to take that gift of a civic society and act as if it never existed before you showed up.
I’ve no idea who wrote that, it is from some screenshot someone took and then posted to Twitter.
“What does it mean when something is fragile, Ess?”
“You hold it very very gentle and close to your HEART.”
The Future of Not Working is about a few things, among them the test of universal basic income as viable social policy. It touches on the continuing and seismic shift in labor from humans to machine automation. But what it really helped me understand was how to help those in poverty:
One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just $66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what the world spends on foreign aid.
People at the bottommost rungs of the socioeconomic ladder know exactly, like surgically-precisely what they need and the best way to get that to them is simple: cash.
Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
From the Paris Review’s famous interview of E. B. White, 1969:
Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.
If you ask Ess to say “snake” she’ll say “tank”. She usually drops the sibilant “S” sound at the beginning of words; if we really try to get her to say it, she’ll go with the “sh” phoneme.
If you ask her to say “Sammy the Snake” you get “Hammy the Tank”.
Also, she put six wooden people in her diaper and when Mykala asked what was going on, Ess was very honest: “…some people in there.” The people got a thorough cleaning and a few days off on the countertop. No further uses of diaper-as-pockets have been observed. Maybe a Bill Cunningham-esque French workman’s jackets — the kind with all the pockets — would be good for Ess. Lots to carry as a toddler.
The Most Beautiful Shots in The History of Disney is, of course, filled with plenty of amazing scenes of animation. But the music, my god, hook up some headphones and behold Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Flight from the City.
“Hey Essie, can you come sit on my lap to read the book?”
“No, I have to see it from far away.”
“Essie, what color is Dada’s hair?”
“Brown, like a moose!”
“Essie, tell Monkey Marge to say goodnight to Dada.”
“Goodnight, Dada. … ooh ooh aah aah.”
A few nights ago, Mykala drove us around to look at Christmas lights. Ess sang Christmas songs in the back. She took off her boots and then her socks, like she always does. Then she told us about how one of her feet was cold:
“Mama foot cold. Mama foot not under the blanket. Mama foot is cold.”
“Ess, did you take off your boot?”
*30 seconds of silence*
This kind of straightforward holiday outing, to go see the lights, is so much more special when you are with someone who is experiencing it for the first season of their life. You feel more hopeful when you see this little person experiencing so much wonder and novelty and joy at the same time.
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