Problems solved (or at least ameliorated, for now)

 An eventful weekend: got my second COVID shot yesterday morning, spent the afternoon with wife and Younger Daughter and Brother-in-law celebrating his birthday and his recovery from COVID and heart surgery; and on Friday, before Saturday's day-long deluge and resultant flooding (pics), had a charmed near-perfect early Spring day featuring (1) helpful physical therapy (decompression and laser) for my increasingly-debilitating ambulatory impairment, (2) a delightful bikeride in Warner Parks, and (3) a practically unimpaired and painless hike, first such in months, through the Burch Reserve. 

Looking forward to Democracy in America this week, where we'll conclude midterm reports--they've been great--and wrap up Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses. It's been eye-opening.

We began the course with its eponymous inspiration, Alexis de Tocqueville's 19th century classic. We come almost full-circle with Andersen's pointed observation of just how far we've fallen, in our corporate "donation"-driven, oligarchically self-interested and uncompromisingly polarized politics. "And so, inevitably, we must consult Tocqueville... In the 1830s [he wrote that] 'money does not lead those who possess it to political power'..." 

Andersen asks rhetorically if his grandchildren will grow up "as ignorant of [2020] as I was of the global viral pandemic that my grandparents survived and of the 1919 'race riots'...? Extrapolating from the present generation's collective lack of historical interest, I'd have to venture a probably. How does that make me feel about the long-term human prospect, and the future of American democracy? Not great. But also not overconfident that any of us has a clue where we'll be in a generation or two, either.

What would George Santayana say? I told you so? "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Santayana is (was?) my mentor Lachs's favorite, and William James's teacher before he was his colleague. James described Santayana's Platonist philosophy as possessing "a perfection of rottenness". But as a pluralist he was still happy to make room for it. If Santayana didn't exist we'd have to invent someone like him.

 

Much in Andersen's final chapters deserves mention, but I'm particularly drawn to this: "it's all about solving the one overriding problem--what economists call the economic problem, how people decide how to use the available resources to survive and, beyond mere survival, to enjoy life... it becomes primarily a cultural and psychological problem that people must decide is solved." 

That is, if we can eventually automate and thus enhance our economy to the extent of displacing scores of people from jobs that fail to fulfill, and can free the greater number of us to flourish with a form of happiness based on activities rooted in work we actually enjoy, then we'll be in a position to decide there's more to life than material consumption. We'll be free to live what GS called the life of reason, and to validate his statement that there's no cure for life and death "save to enjoy the interval."

I'm just hoping they don't try to automate my job, which in the classroom or zoomroom most days (excluding those involving the filling out of forms, and the other administrative stuff) is truly a source of deepest enjoyment.

Tomorrow, for instance, we get to talk in CoPhi about John Rawls, Peter Singer, and (in the context of Alan Turing and AI) our future robotic overlords. So glad I still get to do that. 

Hannah Arendt's world

 LISTEN. WATCH (Recorded October '20). The most interesting philosopher in today's CoPhi lineup, for my money, and by far the one with the most timely and relevant message for this moment when the future of democracy feels so precarious, is Hannah Arendt. She warned us to beware the "terribly and terrifyingly normal" average fellow citizens we'd never suspect of harboring a capacity for sadism and violence. She said:

• “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
• “As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”
• “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
• “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Origins of Totalitarianism

In other words, Fantasyland is ripe for the picking. There may never in history have been such a concentration of banal, unthinking, uninformed, lonely (isolated, disconnected, paranoid/conspiratorial) people as we find here now. 

Paranoid/conspiratorial?

"[T]o a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point... Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome...Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies." Farhod Manjoo

Why "lonely"? 

Loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings. --Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Aeon [and see her FiveBooks recommendations]

But don't overlook the crucial distinction between loneliness and solitude, the latter being indispensable for the independence of thought that enables us to think for ourselves. Sapere Aude, as Arendt's fellow Konigsbergian implored. "We need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think."

Let us hope she was right to think a relative few thinking, informed, connected citizens would or could suffice to neutralize their threat. "Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation."

And, let us hope we can still share and vindicate her confidence in the power of education to resist the anti-democratic tide.

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

Love for the "common world," for John Dewey's "continuous human community in which we are a link," is precisely what we should be teaching and learning. Nothing else will save democracy or preserve a habitable planet for the next generations. That's why voting is such a big deal, even for blue voters in red states (and vice versa): it's our most democratic ritual of renewal. 

Originally published 10.22.20

==

Arendt thought philosophers should give more attention to natality, the natural complement of mortality.

The two central features of action are freedom and plurality. By freedom... Arendt means the capacity to begin, to start something new, to do the unexpected, with which all human beings are endowed by virtue of being born. Action as the realization of freedom is therefore rooted in natality, in the fact that each birth represents a new beginning and the introduction of novelty in the world.

...by acting individuals re-enact the miracle of beginning inherent in their birth. For Arendt, the beginning that each of us represents by virtue of being born is actualized every time we act, that is, every time we begin something new. As she puts it: “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting ” (HC, 9).

...“It is in the nature of beginning” — she claims — “that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings … The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world ” SEP

Expect the unexpected. That's wisdom. 

Embrace the distant shore (but also be here now)

 LISTEN (recorded October 2020). Our discussion of Falter and the end of the "human game" yesterday in Environmental Ethics turned to questions of meaning and its possible loss in a technologically transformed future. Todd May's Stone conversation with George Yancy does too.

...I believe, with some of the existentialists, that we're not here for any particular cosmic reason or purpose. We just show up, live our lives, and then die. This doesn't mean, of course, that I don't believe in things like morality; rather, I ground morality and values in another way... our death threatens to sap meaning from our lives. Why is this? We live oriented toward our future. Our most important engagements — career, relationships, hobbies, etc. — presuppose future development. Death would cut us off from those developments and thus some of the meaning of our engagements. And it is important to note that because we can die at any time that threat is a constant one. We live under the shadow of death.

...we must engage in forward-looking projects and engagements, because that's inevitable for almost all human beings. A life without ongoing engagements is, for most people, an impoverished one... we must try to live as best we can within the moments of those engagements. Instead of solely looking forward, we should enjoy the present of what we do in the knowledge that at any moment the future could disappear. It's a kind of stereoscopic vision that seeks to orient toward the future while immersing in the present.

I don't think that doing this is easy. For my own part, living more fully in the present is difficult for me. But I have gotten to the stage in my life where I can see its far shore much more clearly than the shore I set out from, and so I am trying to do that with greater urgency... (continues)

He's right, properly focusing a meaningful present with an altered onrushing future while retaining what's valuable from the past is a difficult balancing act. Young people who can't quite see their own far shore so vividly may feel less urgency, but this isn't just a question of personal meaning. It's existential for our species, and our life on Earth. 

On the personal front, though, May's approaching shore reminds me of Northern Exposure's radio deejay philosopher Chris Stevens. "Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon." And, you are here right now. Don't just "snuggle up to your fiber optics baby and bliss out." Connect. Chris quoted Einstein to that effect too, in a nice riposte to Ayn Randian hyper-individualist libertarianism.

“Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we’re here for the sake of others, above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends; and also for those countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by bonds of sympathy.”

We'll talk about that today in CoPhi, beginning with Bertrand Russell's youthful discovery of John Stuart Mill's father's answer to the Big Question about God and the First Cause, then consider Freddy Ayer's youthful positivistic impudence and the brush with mortality that his wife said made him so much nicer "after he died," then Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus on freedom, absurdity, and the perpetual reconstruction of what we call our human and personal natures. 

If Sisyphus was really happy, btw, he'd have had friends helping him with that rock. And he'd have taken more moral holidays, when not working from home during the pandemic. [More Sisyphus cartoons]

Among today's Fantasyland fantasies we consider the incipient early-60s counterculture of Students for a Democratic Society, the culture of gun fetishism and our epidemic of gun violence, The Force, The Pill, and our national obsession with perpetual youth. 

That last topic is a good teaser for our next read, Why Grow Up?, which we'll open after we close How the World Thinks. We're about to do that, after today's chapters on Transience and Impartiality and next time's concluding thoughts. 

The acute Japanese sensibility to the fleeting seasons is one angle on transience. Those revered cherry blossoms are magnificent, and no small part of their magnificence is due to their rapid entrances and exits. They are a natural production of performance art. And tea can teach too. "Teaism is the noble secret of laughing at yourself... the smile of philosophy." 

And take a little wabi-sabi with your tea, to enjoy "the bitter-sweet pathos of things" and find "beauty in imperfection and consolation in impermanence."

Now, maybe I'm ready to go stand in line and vote this morning. 

==

Originally published 10.20.20

You say you want a revolution?

 Well that was a fine and timely Spring Break we gave ourselves (though we're not supposed to call it that, it was a Wellness Holiday)... and now it's Spring! Kurt Andersen sees a glimmer of light at the beginning of the end (let us hope!) of the pandemic.

Have to admit its getting better... https://t.co/FwkDpCWBVT

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) March 20, 2021

Spring always effects a kind of revolution in my outlook and disposition, as the world turns and tilts to the sun. A year ago Spring 2020 was glorious, until on Friday the 13th they pulled the plug on Spring Training--we were in Scottsdale, enjoying our first Cactus League excursion--and the world sorta stopped revolving. 

This Spring, things are finally looking up. Went for an MRI last Wednesday, later today I'll see a neurologist, I go for my second COVID shot next Sunday, and then for a serious second consultation with the surgeon who may promise to fix my constricted spine and get me back to really enjoying the dogwalks that have become, thanks to my increasingly annoying stenosis, a slog.

Meanwhile, back in Democracy in America, it's morning in America again.

 

As Andersen tells the tale in Evil Geniuses, the Reagan Revolution was the pivotal turn away from the light that's landed us in our present hyper-partisan, oligarchic, plutocratic, un-democratic doldrums. (I'm struck once again, btw, by the stark contrast between our collective/political distress and the surge of Spring-fed delight so many of us are gratified to feel every year about this time. The saving salvific surge. Thank goodness for it. Or thank the equinox.) 

 

"Around 1980," Andersen writes, "the Great Uncoupling of the rich from the rest began." Gordon Gecko's ethos of selfishness reigned. ("Greed is right. Greed works.") "Nearly half of Americans said they worried a lot about being laid off... Since 1981 states have cut their funding of public colleges and universities by half... Americans' personal debt excluding home loans increased twelvefold..." And on and on goes the litany of our decline, or rather the decline of the 99%. Plus.

But I've just read Louis Menand's latest Americana essay in The New Yorker, and I take a small measure of courage from his reflections on the meaning of the pre-Reagan Revolution revolution that didn't quite come off.

...The music historian Greil Marcus was a Berkeley undergraduate in 1964. He described the experience of rallies and mass meetings this way:

Your own history was lying in pieces on the ground, and you had the choice of picking up the pieces or passing them by. Nothing was trivial, nothing incidental. Everything connected to a totality, and the totality was how you wanted to live: as a subject or as an object of history. . . . As the conversation expanded, institutional, historical power dissolved. People did and said things that made their lives of a few weeks before seem unreal—they did and said things that, not long after, would seem ever more so.

No, the '60s revolution did not come off. It sputtered and slid anti-climactically into the self-absorbed superficial 70s, eventually paving the way to the Reagan devolution. But as Menand suggests, those Michigan and Berkeley radicals help us recall the great message of American philosophy in the pragmatic tradition (not to mention Marx). "Things do not have to be the way they are."

And, 

The nation was at a crossroads in the nineteen-sixties. The system did not break, but it did bend. We are at another crossroads today. It can be made to bend again.

We'll see. 

Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx

Today in CoPhi we lead off with Mill on Bentham, on happiness, pleasure, quality and quantity, and (crucially) liberty.

Would I rather be a sad human or a happy pig, Socrates dissatisfied or a fool satisfied? We get that question in both the Little History and How the World Thinks today.

Honestly, it depends on when you ask me. I'd prefer to be a happy human on some occasions, a happy pig on others, but never a sad anything. That of course is not an option, in Mill's dichotomy, but shouldn't it be? Can't I be suitably attentive to the world's multifarious deficiencies, and concerned about them, and in select instances actively engaged in ameliorating them, without sacrificing my own good humor?

And then, can't I have my moral holidays too? Can't I indulge my own preferred equivalents of lolling in mud, for a bit? Can't I ride my bike, swim, walk the dogs (again), hit the hammock and read a novel, and so on? Well, I too just take my moral holidays. [Wm James: "I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle" than the Absolute Rationalism of philosophers who insist the world is in better hands than ours.]

J.S. Mill had to overcome his hothouse home-schooled "raisin" and learn that it was okay to spend a fraction of time listening to music and reading poetry, that doing so didn't make him a "pig" but a more sensitive and feeling human being. Wordsworth in particular, Mill's Autobiography reports, had a healing effect. "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of."

Worthy quest. Feelings rightly "colour" our subjective qualitative apprehension of pleasure and happiness, and while we should listen to people who've experienced "higher" pleasures we shouldn't allow them to deny us our own.

Thing is, the Mill who wrote On Liberty would never have thought to impose his own notions of "quality" on free individuals. He just wanted to start a conversation. Fair enough. I don't happen to think pushpin's as good as poetry either. We could talk about it. Free speech is really good for that sort of conversation.

Then today, Darwin. Huxley's reply to Wilberforce seems to me a tour de force of rhetorical brilliance.

...Wilberforce ask[ed] Huxley if he considered himself descended from an ape through his grandmother or grandfather... Huxley, then an undergraduate, retorted: “[A] man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a MAN, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point : eat issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” In short, Huxley preferred the disgrace of an ape to the ignorance of his opponent. Dday
Debates, we've had occasion to notice, are frequently un-enlightening. This one at least had the virtue of being entertaining, and of spotlighting anti-evolutionists' aversion to science. Natural selection is an ingenious idea, one of the best ever in Daniel Dennett's estimation. Darwin didn't think it disproved God, a matter Darwin in any event thought beyond our power to resolve. He did think it proved the unified co-lineage of all humanity, probably far more powerful a belief if we all could accept it.

We read of the Scopes Trial last week in Fantasyland, I'd love to revisit the Dayton judge's disqualification of "my first landlord's" (and the other scientific experts') testimony. Mizzou zoologist Winterton Curtis might have told them about the humanistic philosophy of life, its spiritual joy in living and confidence in the future, and the role of evolutionary theory in establishing our species' capacity for joy and confidence. What a missed opportunity.

If you heard a voice purporting to be God, telling you to murder your child, what would you do? I'd get myself to an infirmary, or a counseling center. I think I'd do that whether or not I happened to identify as Christian. Nothing should ever be allowed to violate the sacred trust of the parent-child relationship, particularly not disembodied phantom voices.

As for trust: Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian who mistrusted Christendom and thought true faith an irrational "leap." What would Anselm and Aquinas say? Leaps into the darkness are sometimes required of us, but shouldn't we have a good reason to jump? And shouldn't a good reason be more than a subjective "truth"?

Julian Baggini: Kierkegaard's point is that no matter how rigorous your logical system, there will always be gaps. As these gaps are logical gaps, it is futile to try to bridge them. Instead, they can only be breached by a leap of faith. What characterises a leap of faith is the absolute uncertainty that underlies it. Faith is by definition that which cannot be proven or disproved. That is why a leap of faith is undertaken in "fear and trembling".


Was Karl Marx an Epicurean communal-ist rather than a statist/communist? Wasn't his vision of utopia ("from each according to ability, to each according to need" in a world where no one has to work at menial tasks merely to meet the basic necessities of living) unrealistic, in a world like ours and a moment like this? Unrealistic not so much due to an allegedly permanent intractability of human nature, but because we've repeated the charge about our essential greed and egoism so often that too many of us now believe it and can't see past it?

But it's a lovely vision, nonetheless.

In Fantasyland we've entered the era of pre-Internet/YouTube/Netflix/Social Media/videogame popular entertainment, already monopolizing people's leisure hours in the 50s. Now we play and work on screens, as I'm doing right now. Thanks, both sincere and sarcastic, are due to Disney and Jobs among others. And what of Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy? [see Carlin Romano's America the Philosophical]

Should small children be made to recite a pledge, "under god" or not? Should any of us pledge blind allegiance to anything? How about the New Age "create your own reality" mentality?

How the World Thinks asks if it's more important to form good habits or to follow strong principles, to build our characters and become good people. Isn't that another false either/or? Don't Aristotle and Confucius have a better idea, about virtue and the mean etc.? Truly good people don't really need a Golden Rule, do they? And the people who need rules most are the least apt to follow them. "Nurture makes actual what nature makes possible." That's possibly the most hopeful statement of all.

Wrong again, Pope & Pangloss

Today in CoPhi, Pope (Alexander) speaks for Leibniz/Pangloss: "whatever is, is right." But that's wrong, right? No reasonable, sane, sensitive and caring person really believes that nothing is ever wrong. So much is wrong, right now. The "Principle of Sufficient Reason" is wrong, if taken to imply that all's right with the world or that the one we've already got is the best we could possibly have. Divine providence is wrong if it can do no better than kill and maim innocent victims. Why, for that matter, did I have to burn myself with java this morning?

Ah well, I should stop kvetching and follow Candide's fine advice: cultivate your garden, work your fields. That means do something, don't just sit there.

Candide and his companions have travelled the world and suffered immensely: they have known persecution, shipwrecks, rapes, earthquakes, smallpox, starvation and torture. But they have – more or less – survived and, in the final pages, find themselves in Turkey – a country Voltaire especially admired – living in a small farm in a suburb of Istanbul. One day they learn of trouble at the Ottoman court: two Viziers and the Mufti have been strangled and several of their associates impaled. The news causes upset and fear in many. But near their farm, Candide, together with his friends Martin and Pangloss, pass an old man who is peacefully and indifferently sitting under an orange bower next to his house... 'people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople; I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold there.’ (BoL, continues)

Cultivating our garden, at this moment, does not afford us the luxury of ignoring the doings in our nation's capitol. We're going to have to mess with politics, that garden's been corrupted and only we can fix it. But the old man's got a point. Do what you can. Don't think all's for the best. If you spill the coffee, clean it up.

We have many other possible discussion topics today, as our reading ranges over Deism, ID (If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?), Hume on miracles and the vanishing self, Rousseau's freedom and chains and "general will," Johnson's "refutation" of Berkeley's idealism, "The Birth of a Nation" screened in Wilson's (very) White House, the Scopes Trial, lots of name-drops we should all now recognize in How the World Thinks (including Socrates and Montaigne on learning to die, Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes on "soul," and these questions: Is it wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it? 207 Can we really author our own lives? Do Americans underrate "contingency" and show too little humility? 208 Is there a breakdown of equilibrium between intimacy and integrity in the west? 214 But if we have time for just one, I like this: Do you "belong in your hometown"? 215

Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again (Look Homeward, Angel), but of course you can. After you've got an education and seen Paris, though, do you want to? But isn't home another garden that needs tending? We all need to try and be safe at home.

Originally published 9.30.20

The quest

I always breathe a sigh of relief, to turn the page on the shortest and often-bleakest month. Twenty-eight days of February, many of them gray and chill and too many of them dangerously icy, were quite enough.  On the 28th we zoomed again with Older Daughter in LA, and then Iturned on the A's-Dodgers Cactus League game from Mesa and opened my arms to Spring. 

Also began seriously pondering how to top my sister's wonderfully silly  birthday/v-day gift (hers is on St. Patty's Day). She keeps finding clever Python-esque presents, year after year. This one arrived from India, mysteriously bundled.

What is my quest? That's always the question, indeed.

Well, one part of my quest this week is to evoke the ever-positive and supportive presence of our departed friend Don, in Democracy class, as we conclude Democracy in Chains and begin report presentations. Over the weekend I reviewed the Zoom recording of his last time with us, on February 9. He appeared tired but still vigorous, enthusiastically sharing several thoughts. He didn't appreciate the over-officiousness of the Super Bowl refs. He encouraged us to stand up and resist the Charter School movement and its subversion of support for public education. He asked us all to get engaged in public life, identify causes worth our time and efforts, write letters to the editor etc.

But I think Don also understood: there's finally only so much any of us can do to save the world, as individuals. We should do what we can, of course, especially in league and in solidarity with like-minded peers. 

And then we should do what only we can really do for ourselves, viz., accept the limitations of our personal reach, and resolve nonetheless to be kind and, in just that way, to pursue our happiness. This is how you resolve the dilemma E.B. White faced, when he said "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." And that is my quest too, to both do what I can to improve the world and to enjoy it.

A student in the MALA Communication class quoted Matthieu Ricard ("the happiest man in the world") quoting Buddhist sage Shantideva: "All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself." Could be.

So, to further our noble quest: be a Stoic Pragmatist, or a Conscientious Epicurean, or a Dewey-eyed Realist, or a Jamesian Meliorist who takes Moral Holidays, and remember what Kurt Vonnegut said: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

Let's pay Don's kindness forward. It'll improve the world and we'll enjoy it.