SurrealPolitiks S01E027 - Of Some Consequence

I had a very troubling experience over the weekend which I think is worth sharing with you because it helps provide some much needed perspective on what is important in our politics.
One of the things I've really liked seeing in recent years is outraged parents. Sure I would prefer they were happy and right to be so. I should hope that would go without saying, but since a parent would have to be terribly uninformed to be content with what is going on in the world these days, their outrage is preferable to their acquiescence.

Few things have outraged parents more, or more rightly, than the atrocities carried out in the name of COVID 19. I remember watching this masking lunacy on TV from jail, and then prison, and joking with guys inside that the people outside the walls had it worse than us.

Among the things that upset me the most about this was when it was pointed out that children who were supposed to be learning to speak were not seeing faces, and since children learn to speak in significant part by watching people's lips move when they talk, they would as a consequence of this have their speech development impeded. As a guy who understands and appreciates the importance of speech perhaps better than most, this really, really upset me.

Now, I don't spend a lot of time talking to four year olds. But there is one I come into contact with on a semi regular basis since I get out of prison, and he's a really sweet kid. He was just a baby when I went away, so he didn't know me at all when our regular interactions began, and these have been roughly weekly.

Time goes forward, he's a little bit more familiar with me as of late, and over the weekend I'm at the grocery store with with his him and his mother. Typically when we do this, we split up, I go do my thing they go do theirs, we meet outside.

This time he says "I want to go with Chris!" and he's kind of insistent upon this. I was honored by the sheer gravitas of his assertiveness.

Now, when he's talking to his mother and father, they understand each other just fine for the most part. But this whole time I've managed to understand maybe 80% of what this kid is saying. I do not off the top of my head know what the normal development timeline of a child's speech is, and since I know his parents are smart and they love him and care for him and everything else about the boy seems fine, I have been operating under the assumption that he probably talks better than most 4 year olds and this will work itself out on what will be, comparative to other kids his age, an accelerated timeline.

But when we're alone in the store, I try to bond with the boy a bit, and I'm unsure of myself because this is the most in depth conversation I've had with a child in a very long time.

"What's your favorite dinner that Mom makes?"

"What games do you like to play"

I'm not understanding his responses, and in my mind, I'm not doing this kid any favors by saying "Yeah go ahead keep babbling kid, and I'll keep nodding like I understand".

So, I realize that I'm the one who is failing to grasp the situation, not him, and I stop trying to push the boy.

We get in the car, and I ask his mother about the expected development timeline of a child's speech.

So she begins to explain the importance of seeing people's lips move when you're learning to speak, and before she could even get started it made perfect sense to me.

He has no shortage of words. He understands everything. He's having trouble with pronunciation, and being aware of this trouble, he keeps on trying to find other words.

This was the first time I had actually witnessed this thing that I was dreading from prison, and it was with this kid who might as well have placed a crown on my head half an hour ago. That's a dangerous combination, when a political issue you're really passionate about hits home in a very personal way.

SurrealPolitiks airs live every Monday at 9:30pm US Eastern