1600 Days: Day 2
The Banality of Goodness
It’s not sexy, but the first series of steps I have to take in order to be a more effective partner, parent, citizen, activist, writer, editor, or employee is going to be a very basic and essential set. I don’t aspire to change the world, myself, but I do want to facilitate positive change and have a positive impact on the safety and prosperity of as many of my fellow humans (now and in the future) as possible. The thing is, my own house is not in order—which I do not mean metaphorically. On Monday, in addition to work and sleep and setting aside some time to remember Emerson and be with Maria, I carved out a few extra minutes to run through extra loads of laundry. That was Day 1’s concrete step toward making the world more free.
Mentally, I find that the day-to-day mess of our household chores (they’re very hard to keep up with, given how much I work and the fact that Maria is our only driver, and therefore has to ferry the kids to all their extracurricular activities) cramps and crunches me. It erodes my sense of effectiveness as a person and my belief that I can be of any help or service to anyone outside the walls that barely hold in our chaos. Nor is that just a manifestation of my own anxiety. It’s a real thing. To ensure my own, Maria’s, and the kids’ health and capacity, we have to develop better daily routines. For all kinds of reasons, that’s been harder to establish for us than for some other families. The big ones are those named above, but the timing of the pandemic with specific regard to our family’s growth and establishment was particularly unlucky, I think. Anyway, this is one aspect of this project, and I feel good about having taken a small but concrete step in the right direction on the first day.
Start Thinking Now: Donald Trump has announced his intention to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. If proposed by any but the most feckless, insecure ingrate ever to fall sideways into public policy, it would rate as the worst idea in human history—which only sounds like hyperbole. From Trump, it’s something more insidious, because it’s not a result of good faith gone stupid. Rather, it’s a conscious step toward changing the priorities of public education in America diametrically, from the development of healthy and literate people to the development of Trump supporters.
The biggest impact this will have, in the short term, is creating an almost immediate and massive shortfall in services and thoughtful policy for students with disabilities. (Always, always, in regimes like this one, the first people to pay a heavy toll are the most vulnerable.) So, make yourself more consciously aware of some resources in your community, and those that stretch out across the nation. Easter Seals is a broad network of organizations dedicated to serving the community of people with disabilities. PACER does a lot of good work for kids with disabilities, with a specific emphasis on education, from right where I am in the Twin Cities. You can begin to ponder donations to these organizations, but think, too, about how you and your friends and your kids and your neighbors can reach out to people with disabilities. That will be one of the first places where the full weight of the malice and malignancy of a Trump administration lands, so it can be one of the first places where we direct our energy toward harm reduction.