• Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Kasia grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in Warsaw. There was no coddling there. When she was in first grade, her teacher took her on a field trip to the site of a recent plane crash, where she stared at the charred sneakers of dead passengers. The lesson seemed to be: Bad things happen, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Oh, yeah, and build better planes. That plane, by the way, was headed to Warsaw from — where else? — the United States. The symbolism went deep.

    I have literally nothing for this. It’s such an unfathomably bizzare thing to say.

    The real problem with my approach, however, is that I was robbing my kids of a sense of urgency, a sense that the situation, in much of the world, is dire and that it demands their attention. So I’ve embraced the Iron Curtain response: Yes the world is broken, which is why you need to fix it. Lucian’s response to this, of course, is: We didn’t break it. You did. Touché. He also reminds us: If you can’t fix things, what makes you think I can? And I can only reply: Maybe you can’t, but you still have to try.

    What a fucking asshole.