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“If one person sold their boat, we could feed the world.” This is what my ten year old said to me.
We were reading Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States the other night, learning about Bacon’s Rebellion, indentured servants, class lines during the colonial period, and how in 1770 the top 1% of landowners in Boston owned 44% of the wealth. He said, “That’s not much different from how it is today,” and he was right.
As I read to him, he thought out loud, “How terrible. I can’t even imagine. They were all just people. Mama, there should be a tax on rich people to help poor people.” Yes, baby, there should be. Instead, we give rich people tax breaks so they can go buy more yachts, while the government cuts snap benefits and moms go hungry to feed their babies. 250 years later and what have we learned?
I asked him to tell me more about how one boat was going to solve world hunger, and he told me Jeff Bezos’ yacht cost $500 million. I said I didn’t think that alone could solve world hunger, so we looked it up—$93 billion per year is what it would cost—so definitely more than Bezos’ yacht, but only 1% of global military spending. So if we valued humans, even the poor ones, we could solve world hunger. But we value war more.
And that $93 billion is still hundreds of billions less than what Elon Musk is worth. So maybe one boat won’t solve world hunger, but Nicholas was right—one person certainly could.
A little while later I was catching up on the news, and there was one story after another of ICE taking more people. Another five year old named Liam who was about to start kindergarten is now at Dilley. A mother and daughter who were taken to the hospital in Florida after a severe car accident where their car rolled four times were questioned by ICE while receiving treatment, and then were arrested and taken into custody despite their pending asylum case. Two professors with green cards and their teenager were also taken to Dilley. My son saw Liam’s photo as I was reading and burst into tears. “Just because they’re from a different place on the same planet, doesn’t mean that we need to do this,” he said. My ten year old has more emotional intelligence, more empathy, more compassion than anyone in our current administration
Children are naturally empathetic. Hate and bigotry must be taught. I watched the video of Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy telling his daughter she can’t go to Harvard because they take “good young girls like you and corrupt their minds.” Republicans are so terrified of education, because education wards off indoctrination.
Then the disgusting Callaway and Good Good ad glorifying violence against women came out, and frankly, I’m not used to still being stunned these days, but I genuinely gasped and felt sick to my stomach. It wasn’t funny. It was downright scary and heartbreaking that anyone thought physically assaulting a woman would be a good way to sell golf clubs. I showed the ad to all three of my kids. They looked confused and said, “I don’t get it. What is this?”
This is the toxic masculinity seeping into all aspects of our culture. This is the coldness, the lack of humanity that so many have conditioned themselves to to be able to vote for Trump, to still support the Republican party, and to excuse the many Democrats who are barely lifting a finger to fight this administration. The fact that a major company thought this ad was okay to air shows just how far gone we are—how we could excuse a president for boasting about “grabbing women by the pussy,” how we could simply move on without any prosecutions from the Epstein files, how we could turn a blind eye to the murders that ICE has committed, how we can ignore the innocent people being held in concentration camps for the sole crime of being “from a different place on the same planet.”
Read to your kids about history. Talk to them about what’s happening in the world. Listen to them. They are brilliant and kind and empathetic and you will learn from them. We have a responsibility to raise children who think, who care, and who will fight to get us out of this mess.

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