This short one sent me so quickly into weeping. It's a great emotional depth with much positive thinking, as Noah describes how he tracked his father down, met him after 10 years of disconnect and got "right into it!".
A reunion motivated by his Mom's request:
[...] Too many men grow up without their fathers, so they spend their lives with a false impression of who their father is and what a father should be. You need to find your father. You need to show him what you've become. You need to finish that story.
and prepped for by her thoughtful and loving upbringing:
When a parent is absent, you're left in the lurch of not knowing, and it's so easy to fill that space with negative thoughts. "They don't care." "They are selfish." My one saving grace was that my mom never spoke ill of him. She would always compliment him. "You're good with your money. You get that from your dad." "You have your dad's smile." "You're clean and tidy like your father." I never turned to bitterness, because she made sure I knew his absence was because of circumstances and not a lack of love. She always told me the story of her coming home from the hospital and my dad saying "Where's my kid? I want that kid in my life." She'd say to me, "Don't ever forget: He chose you."
A more particular moment of inspiration out of this chapter, having just watched Trump's inauguration speech 47th president of the USA, was when I read this sentence:
Because racism never made sense to my father, he never subscribed to any of the rules of apartheid.
Trevor's father's crisp view and refusal of an entire system judging on its core racist stance is fascinating, and it seems to be what many of us have been missing today.
The political scene in this unfortunate social media age we find ourselves in, mobilizes people with the stone-age fear of the other, the surrender to the most pessimistic apocalyptic scenarios for humanity, and the turn towards shallow role models the current "leaders" of the "free world" are creating those who follow or vote for them. How did we end up here?
Very well said by Rebecca Shaw in her opinion piece to The Guardian:
Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.
So here I add another embarrassment that I have witnessed among my closest circles. That attempt to (over-)analyse every single move, word, intention or decision of the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg, and to (over-)dose on the hopes that these maniacs somehow might know things we don't know, or might have our best interest in mind in ways we just don't understand.
What used to be the harmless mental masturbation intellectuals like to indulge in, is and probably has been for a while far from being harmless. In the face of Zuckerberg's recent announcement , Musk's longer downfall into the untouchable fascist force of this world, and the just-now ridiculous speech of Trump's inauguration , a statement like "let's think through what Zuckerberg or Musk are maybe after." or "Maybe they are really trying to solve big problems for humans and societies at scale. Let's analyse it." are at this point mental harassment of the values and aspirations we all have been holding for more human rights, peace, ecological awareness and solidarity and had believed we've been achieving over the last 80 years. Be it a reminder to us all, one that we sadly needed to get the hard way, that progress can never be taken for granted. We can never stop pouring efforts into keeping moving forward. We shy away a brief moment, a fascist tyrannical oligarchy takes over majority the of power centers over the world as we begin 2025. This is the simple truth we have to stop questioning and over-analysing, so we can effectively fight it back and survive this wave with minimal destruction over the next few years.