What Can We Do?

The first thing you're gonna need to do is clean up. Then we'll get to work.

“Did you see that press conference today?”

“Ugh. I know. It’s just disgusting.”

Over the last decade or so, this sort of bleak commiseration has become a familiar part of our household after-work routine—one of us unloading the dishwasher or sorting through a stack of mail, the other prepping for dinner, dystopia swirling all around an otherwise-mundane night in suburbia.

This time around, though, something’s different.

“What are you guys talking about?”

“Oh, uh, nothing, honey—just something Mommy and Daddy saw on the news.”

“I heard about that at school today.”

I’ve grown accustomed to the difficulties of raising kids in Uncertain Times, but I can’t say that I was prepared for the moment when they would actually be aware of what was going on. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to me, though. My oldest turns ten in a couple of months. I turned 10 in 1992, and I remember 1992. Maybe not all of the details, but I certainly had a sense of the zeitgeist, the major news events: the Barcelona Olympics, the Los Angeles riots, the Bush-Clinton-Perot election. Those were things I knew about at the time, and it’s sobering to realize that my kids are now old enough to know about the events happening in their world—a world that’s no longer bounded by the walls of our house and the things my wife and I specifically tell them.

Heck, the almost-ten-year-old recently told me he’d looked me up on his school computer and found this newsletter¹, a piece of information that surely reflected across my face like Doc Brown realizing the Libyans had found him.

“Great. Scott.”

The point of all this is to say—I can’t keep the world from my kids any longer.

I’m not sure that I’d want to if I could, to be honest; there are plenty of kids out there for whom the luxury of ignorance was never an option. God willing, they’re going to live in this world a good long time, and sooner or later they’re gonna have to learn how it’s put together.

With that said—partially as artistic conceit and partially to cover myself in the apparently-not-that-implausible event they end up reading this—I’m going to switch to addressing them directly here.

(Seriously, guys, this is not what the your school computer time is for. You should be learning home keys and playing Oregon Trail, I think.)

First things first—I don’t know what happens next.

I’ll just be honest with you about that. I think I have a far better hit rate on predicting near-future events than your average cable news commentator or legacy media opinion columnist, but I’d be lying if I said I expected to be here again.

I do know, however, that what has already happened didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. Some people want this, and understanding that is key if we’re going to do anything about it.

Second: I will do whatever I can to keep you safe.

That’s been my charge since long before you were born, and it’ll be my charge as long as I’m alive. It might seem annoying at times—I’m sorry, but you can’t go on regular, non-kids YouTube without me supervising—but it’s my job, and I take it far more seriously than any of my other jobs.

Third: even with #2 in mind, you are not the ones I am worried about right now.

We are lucky. I tell you this a lot, but it’s true. Call it fate, call it luck, call it a blessing, whatever—we’ve drawn a good hand in life, and we should be grateful for that. That doesn’t mean we’re more deserving than anyone else, though. It just means we’re fortunate, which also means we have a responsibility to others take care of others who aren’t as lucky as we are.

So, what can we do?

You’ve suggested a few interesting ideas on your own, and for me to repeat them here might get me on a watchlist. The truth of the matter is, we’re only four people in a big country, and we can’t change the big-ticket problems all by ourselves.

Those problems are symptoms of a larger sickness, though, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re doing what we can to cure it.

Put things back where you found them.

You’ve already heard my lectures on this. We push the grocery cart back to the store even if it’s raining outside. If we realize we don’t need something in our cart while we’re shopping, we put it back on the shelf—and if we mess up the shelf, we straighten it up. We pick up our trash and put our things away.

These things are little, but a healthy society depends on people doing the right thing when no one else is watching, even if it’s a right thing that doesn’t seem like it matters.

Don’t assume that someone else will do it, and don’t make someone else’s life harder.

On that note…

Call people by their name.

My name is Scott. (You, being my kids, know this.) I hate being called Scotty, Scooter, or pretty much any nickname variation you can come up with. Similarly, our last name is Hines, and I have spend four decades trying not to look too cross when someone thinks they’re the first person to say “oh, like the ketchup?” (No, actually, it’s NOT.)

I’m an adult now, and these things don’t get under my skin the way they did in grade school, but I’ve shared them with you before as examples of the kind of things you shouldn’t do. When you told me that your friend was nicknamed “Pickles”, I made sure that you knew they were cool with that nickname before you perpetuated it.

(They were, fortunately, and that’s good, because it’s a cool nickname.)

You’ve got a good handle on all that, which means you’ve got a great start on something a lot of adults clearly don’t have a handle on: respecting someone’s identity is, quite literally, the least you can do.

There’s no downside, and the upside is that you’ve treated someone like a person.

Be kind.

This one’s tricky.

You see, kindness isn’t just about holding doors open and talking sweetly. (Though, you should hold doors open. You’re Midwest-Southerners. It’s our culture.) I hate to say it, but there are people who’ll use that kind of superficial kindness as cover while they do things that hurt people a lot more than a door to the face.

Kindness isn’t about the show, it’s about actually caring about other people.

I know you know how to do that. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.

Speaking of which—

Don’t give up.

Did you know that in 2016, the Cleveland Cavaliers faced a three-games-to-one deficit in the best-of-seven NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors, the team with the greatest regular-season record of all time and the reigning MVP?

Of course you knew that. I’ve made you watch that video before, and you had a stuffed LeBron James in your crib. Well, the Cavs didn’t give up, did they? No, and neither should you. Things might look pretty dire at times—including right now—but if you think you’re going to lose, well—you’re going to lose.

Our world isn’t as cut-and-dried as a basketball game, but you need to believe that winning is possible.

Work hard.

I just used a basketball metaphor, but I’ll be frank—you’re probably never going to dunk a basketball. You know that I believe you can achieve anything, but your mother and I didn’t do you a lot of favors genetically on that front. (Sorry about that.)

That said, there’s a heck of a lot you can achieve if you work hard, and almost none of it’s easy. In fact, if it is easy, that’s all the more reason to work hard at it, because you shouldn’t waste a gift.

Of course, if you do dunk a basketball I will be very proud of you.

Judge for yourself.

I’m offering you a lot of my own advice here, and you’ve probably been thinking about how soon I’ll let you go back to playing Minecraft through most of it.

Well, don’t listen to me—listen to yourself. If you hear some politician or public figure talking about how someone else is the source your problems? Judge for yourself. Has the person or people they’re talking about ever wronged you, personally? No? I didn’t think so. Maybe that person passing blame is the actual problem.

On the other side of this coin—don’t miss out on a potential ally just because they’re not who you expect them to be. Keep an open mind, and you might be surprised.

Go outside.

“Touch grass” is a common enough refrain on the internet, and a phrase you’ve brought home from school already. I don’t always love how you deploy it, but there’s a point there—talk only goes so far. (I know. I’m great at talking, and it’s only gotten me this far.) We can sit around all day and talk about how we’re gonna fix the world, but at some point, we’re just gonna have to get out there and give it a go.

Besides, it’s a nice day out there, and you’ve been playing too much Minecraft lately anyway.

—Scott Hines (your dad, but also @actioncookbook)

1. They already knew I had this newsletter. You think I can cook all the things I cook without explaining myself? Still, there’s knowing and then there’s seeing.