Hi friends,
Joshua trees — also known as yucca palms — are not the kind of trees you hug (because they have very pointy leaves). California hugged them anyway; the state passed legislation to fund a conservation plan and to protect existing joshua trees.
Joshua trees are threatened by climate change — as is every living thing — and if they are going to thrive, they need some love and protection.
Whose?
I come back to this question so often. On a recent walk with B, the young person I look after, we watched the team of workers who were pruning the trees and mulching the branches they had removed.
Two days later, B was was looking for the truck and the pruners. I speculated that they had finished their work on his street and had moved on to prune trees elsewhere.
All the way home, B asked, “is this my street?” We talked about how the street where you live is your street even though it’s also other peoples’ street, too.
“Is this my tree?” B asked. It is, I told him. And it is also everyone else’s tree.
How big do we draw the circle of care? Bigger, I think.
Ezra Klein recently interviewed economist Darrick Hamilton about the importance of baby bonds for addressing the nation’s wealth gap. Hamilton describes a baby bond as
a birthright to capital. It says, irrespective of the economic situation in which you’re born into, we will endow you with capital, such that, when you become a young adult, you can purchase an asset that provides that passive savings, that passive appreciation, where you get economic security. You get economic agency that comes along with wealth as a birthright.
I found the discussion fascinating and then was thrilled to learn that Connecticut’s new baby bonds program has begun to invest $3,200 for every child born after July 1, 2023 and is eligible for the state’s Medicaid program.
Those investments will be managed by the state until the children turn 18, at which point the recipients will be able to use the money to buy a home, pay for college, start a business or save for retirement — the type of financial assistance that children from wealthier households often receive from their parents or families.
Our children.
[The law] calls upon state officials to not comply with laws in other states that would remove trans children from their parents’ custody. It states that New York courts cannot use such laws to classify the provision of gender-affirming healthcare as child abuse. Law enforcement and court officials are also barred from complying with out-of-state investigations of trans children and their parents who seek care in New York.
Additionally, the bill builds upon existing protections for abortion providers, extending the same graces to providers of gender-affirming care. Under the law, offering this care cannot be classified as misconduct. This ensures that practitioners’ licenses cannot be taken away simply for doing their jobs.
When I feel most hopeful, it is because the circle of care seems to be expanding.
Send Books Through Bars to reach readers who are incarcerated through Freebird Books.
I recently found myself reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Here’s a short passage for all of us.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
with love,
L