The Second Most Important Day

Happy Tuesday - 

I just came across an apocryphal Mark Twain quote: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”  

Becoming a father led me to question the successful film and branding / special effects work that I’d been doing up in New York–in fact, it led to deciding our family would relocate to Baltimore to center the kids, led to me considering what I would be most proud to explain to my kids that I’d done to change the world for the better–and all of that led me to dedicate my life to working on the future.  I have been privileged to spend the last 20 years working to better the approaches that we use to support the lives of all children, teens, and young adults.  

Whether each of us has chosen to have children or not, we should be able to agree that how we treat children as a society is an excellent metric for whether we have our eye on the future–which is really the whole ballgame.  Even the Barbenheimer double-film-phenomenon suggests the same: if we push the limits of science and find the answers to fundamental questions but create world-destroying weapons that we cannot control…and if we create a candy-colored fantasy world in which we play-act at thriving while remaining unaware of the ways the actual people in the world are not thriving–then the future is in doubt and our present-day gains are illusory.  

So I take heart in working with all of you to secure a better future–not by looking back at what we imagine were the best parts of our past, but by imagining forward to what our collective world of children need and deserve: equity, education, empathy, and the basic support of their human rights.