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PamelaDrew's avatar

Not to be totally unoriginal but this is one of the most wonderful pieces in recent memory and your baseline setsa pretty high bar in its own right.

"that is the most important lesson in all of growing up. not piano or soccer or interpretive headstand watercolor painting and certainly not indoctrination into the grievance cults of wokedom:

what must be learned is how to become self-governing.

and it has been stolen from our children."

For all of us who flourished with benign neglect, lawn darts , clackers, plastic super bubbles, injection mold vacu-form at lava like temperatures, playing Mumbly-peg throwing jackknives everyone of us always had in our pockets, even at school this is powerful nostalgia.

When there was an outbreak of measles or chickenpox our moms would drag us to the home of the infected kids; in my mother's words, "Better to get it now when we know what it is and all of you get it at the same time and get over it and send you back to school together. If you catch it later we might need to go to the doctor to diagnose you and what a pain that is!"

Everyone ate PB&J sandwiches in a lunchroom with our two cent container of milk. We never conceived of lactose intolerance or life threatening peanut allergies, we never knew other kids on prescription drug regiments, we never heard the word syndrome, but we all had first hand experience with broken bones and stitches and we did indeed draw priceless lessons from that. :~)

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Pedros pixel.'s avatar

This is possibly the best, most poignant post I have read about the current state of humanity in a very, very long time.

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