All of our fellow animal creatures, as Aristotle observed long ago, try to stay alive and reproduce more of their kind.
—Martha Nussbaum
You love your kids more than anything. They are so special to you. Your eyes close when you think about them. Your heart softens. There is nothing you wouldn’t do for them. There is no one who means more.
Think about them for a second. Do you feel that radiating warmth? Do you feel it washing over you? You just want to hug them, right? Maybe you even want to cry. That’s what being a parent is.
Now take a minute to consider the many people with whom you share that feeling. Consider how basically every single person, even murderers on death row, even the rude person who just shoved you in the supermarket, even the billionaire you think is destroying our political system, has that same feeling about their kids. Run it backward and forward too. Cleopatra felt that way about her daughter. Frederick Douglass felt it about his sons. So too did billions of ordinary people in small towns and caves and ships on stormy oceans.
Being a parent is something special. It’s also something that is nearly universal. We might be kinder and more forgiving and find more common ground if we could just remember that a little more often.