Stoke The Fire And Watch The Blaze

Why do we hand off the most consequential jobs to luck? Raising a human being gets almost no preparation, and yet we treat that as normal, as though a person is just free to stamp their influence on something enormous or to shrug it off. Think about it for a second. Do any of us really hold an inalienable right to wreck somebody's life before that somebody has even had a chance to live it? Is bringing a child into the world a right, or is it closer to a privilege? If we weren't permitted to steer a person until they reached adulthood, could we damage them as badly as we sometimes do?

Ownership, people assume, applies to property and not to persons. You might look at how some families operate and conclude otherwise, but the assumption is still wrong. Does helping conceive someone grant you license to derail the life that follows? Consider the contradiction baked into how we argue about rights. Environmentalists push to limit what owners may do with their land, while we hesitate to put any limit on how a family molds a child, even when that molding narrows or kills off the child's future and whatever that child might have contributed.

Parenting classes, taken early enough, before the kids arrive or at least before it becomes too late to repair anything, tend to help the parents and the children both. There's a tension here worth sitting with. We defend everyone's freedom to hold their own values, yet in doing so we sometimes guarantee that certain people grow up with no values at all, never exposed to any. So the question is simple: are values useful or not? They point people toward goals and toward respecting that others may hold different beliefs entirely. When we decline to teach values, what often gets protected instead is the right to have none. And when that happens, human life itself, before or after birth, can stop registering as worth anything, which is how killing and enslaving other people becomes thinkable.

Drop values from the equation and love usually drops out with them. There's a grim historical record on this. Infants left in old-style orphanages, raised without a mother or a father present, often failed to thrive, and some simply did not survive to grow up. Odd, then, that certain people react more strongly to cruelty toward animals than toward children, born or unborn. Give an animal the opportunity and it will frequently attach itself, emotionally, to another animal or to a person. Why wouldn't a human deserve that same opportunity? We praise pets for the unconditional love they offer their owners, and we note how people who are isolated, or sick, seem to do better with an animal around. So what is unconditional love, really? Love handed over with no demand that it come back. A recognition that life carries worth on its own terms. Something that feeds the giver every bit as much as the one receiving it.

To give without keeping score. A lot of modern business minds would call that foolish. But compelled giving does not reliably produce trust, and it does not reliably produce anything returned to you. Stoke the fire and watch the blaze. Everyone carries something they can offer. Love sits at the center of what values are. When you care for other living things, you reinforce the worth you place on life itself. We tend to quit caring about things once we decide our caring changes nothing, and that quitting is exactly how evil, which is really just the absence of values, gets its opening. It feeds on people who have been talked out of believing they could ever make a difference.

Pull up the dictionary definitions of "power" and "force." We're frequently told we lack the strength to make anything happen. That belief is the engine behind wars: the conviction that you must apply force, overriding someone's will, to get them to do what you want against their wishes. Power is something else. Power is the strength that lives inside genuinely wanting to do good, and it runs deeper than force. Good people often leave it unused because they doubt they possess it, or they doubt it could stand up against evil's force. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were power in motion. Love and goodness are what stand behind it.

So stoke the fire of good and watch it catch. Giving unconditional love is how you light it. We are not powerless, whatever the people with no values want us to believe, the ones who would prefer we had no values either, and who reach for force to manufacture evil.

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