Children

Being Four

Wesley, we’ve been teaching you a lot, and you’re a great learner. But I’m not sure you don’t have something to teach us as well. Your Mommy and I took you to Baltimore last weekend. We rode on a subway and you didn’t want to get off. You could be happy riding the subway all day. Or an escalator. You could ride up and down escalators all day and be ecstatic. Anyone who came near those escalators would be infected with happiness. We went to a children’s read more

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Senators Versus Students

By David Swanson

As long as we’re going to dump most of our money into wars and the military and Wall Street and health insurance bailouts, students are going to have to go into debt to afford college. But it would cost the students less and the government less, if private companies were not permitted to act as middlemen profiting off public loans to students.

One of the companies so profiting, Sallie Mae, is based here in Virginia and funnels millions of dollars from its profits into lobbying read more

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Being Three

To Wesley Neil Swanson
From David Christopher Naylor Swanson
April 4, 2009

We took you to the doctor for an annual checkup a couple of days ago, Wesley, and you hadn’t been since last year. He couldn’t find anything wrong with you, and you now stand 37 inches tall and weigh 33 pounds, so you’ve fallen in both weight and height to more average for your age, whereas you started out big in both, and you’ve fallen more in weight because you’re slimming out, you’re read more

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Mommy, What's Waterboarding?

By David Swanson

Remember the great harm done to the moral core of our nation when, according to the excited news reports following Kenneth Starr’s great work in life, children were asking their parents what oral sex was? Neither do I. But children can now ask their parents what torture is, how waterboarding works, and when exactly torture is a good thing. “Mommy, we’re going to play enemy combatant. Can I have some pliers to pull out Geoffrey’s fingernails?”

Can read more

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