SOCIALISTA

A usual Thursday morning here – get kids up for school, make kids breakfast, make kids lunches and pack them in their backpacks, nag kids to finish eating, remind kids to brush their teeth and hair and find their shoes and quit bickering and hey wait finish that sausage, and get them out the door. In the middle of this, today MissSix, out of nowhere and to no one in particular, said, “I liked what Obama said in that speech. Bill Gates shouldn't have all the money, the people who work should have the money because they work.”

I stopped shoving granola bars in insulated bags for a second and glanced up at her, and smiled. She had a rather earnest look on her face, seemed satisfied with her statement, then returned to her sausage-nomming. I have no idea whatsoever where she came up with her interesting mashup of information – certainly not from this Microsoft-powered household – but I delight in her 1st grade politics, and that she is thinking about such things. MissMarx.

I think, to her and probably a lot of other kids in the area, Bill Gates is The King of America. They know he lives in a mansion, has all the gold, and has thousands of minions toiling away for him in the bowels of concrete-and-glass buildings spread out all over his Land. He meets with Presidents and Prime Ministers and Kings and rock stars. Everything and anything is at his beck and call. He eats bon bons and drinks thick chocolate milkshakes from Burgermaster all day, delivered to him on a platinum platter from a diamond-encrusted hovercraft. He is mysterious and powerful, so much so that he can keep Daddy from getting home in time for tuck-in at night, sometimes.

Grade school children, developmentally, are all about rules and what is fair. They are beginning to see the world outside their own needs and wants, and this world is lacking nuance, abstraction, rationalization, or subtlety. It is starkly black-and-white. Things are right or wrong, period. MissSix can’t grasp the complexities of modern democracy, the redistribution of wealth beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the debate over compassionate social programs vs. the lingering apathy of the welfare state, Capitalism and the bell curve, or that you can have people starve to death in the middle of the candy store. That is no breakfast discussion; it is maybe best brought up over a seven-course dinner.

It will take her awhile to see for herself that the concept of what is “fair” is an endless argument, and that rules are often chameleon in nature, and are sometimes things to be paid great heed, or ignored completely, or smashed into pieces. For now, she can eat her healthy balanced breakfast, tie her shoes, and just think.