Kids get it.
I've got reason to hope for the future of this country. I've seen the mind and heart of a little girl who will be voting for the first time in the 2015 elections. My daughter will still be in high school, voting for school board - I like that. Maybe she'll have a chance to vote for Edwards' second term in 2016? We'll see. By that time, Montgomery County, PA should be past the tipping point, with a majority of registered voters Dems. It's a little thing, but in extended comments is a conversation we had recently that really gives me hope for the future.
So my beautiful, smart 7 yr old, Antonia, comes home from school the other day, and describes a story she read in school about girl who lived on the Alaskan coast. The story was about the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill, although it didn't seem to name names. In the story the girl finds a tiny infant sea lion along the shore. Her family brings it to an emergency clinic, it's very sick, but is cared for, and survives. She was pretty upset about it, and I asked her what she thought we should do to keep an accident like this from happening again.
Here are her suggestions:
- make a rule [law] that there can't be any careless driving of giant ships. If you drive giant ships carelessly once, you can't drive them any more.
- You can't send more than 40 gallons of oil in a boat. Not ever.
- Since there are airplanes going places anyway, send small amounts in the airplanes.
- That company has to teach it's workers to do a better job. If Mommy worked there, they would have made that [captain] get a different job that he could do better (since they knew he had problems in the past). [Mommy's an HR manager, and deals a lot with corrective action and job-fit issues.]
So we've got tougher requirements for those entrusted with the transport of environmentally dangerous materials, and a transportation system that minimizes risk by distributing the hazard across many more trips and across existing freight transport modes. Put the details aside, and the concepts seem remarkably sound to me. The "feasibility" of her suggestions of course, isn't the point.
What makes me hopeful is that she understands the consequences of carelessness with the environment. She can see that just moving thousands of gallons of oil is an inherently dangerous task, and that the risk should be reduced. She wants to see the companies and individuals involved held responsible for their damage to the environment. If she can't eliminate the hazard, she's willing to find a way to reduce it to the point where it can be managed.
In a way, I feel weird posting this here - basically using this opportunity to brag about my kid. But I have to believe that it matters. It gives me hope to think that beyond Nov 2, beyond this year or this election cycle, there's one kid who will act to bring about positive change. There are kids now learning intolerance, and hate, learning in a million little ways that government is a thing to be feared, attacked, reduced. From an afternoon's conversation, I can believe that some will stand and be counted.
Between Fear and Hope, hope wins.