kathartickat

i mean look

And it's like oh. oh sweetie. Honey. That's the iron. It's supposed to be there. The baby cereal is fortified with iron.

like, as in the mineral part of "daily essential vitamins and minerals"? You know, that iron? It's actually iron. The metal? Which is magnetic. Because it's iron.

I was sending a box of stuff to France, and it included a signed and authenticated N64 game cartridge. I didn't want to take THE SLIGHTEST REMOTEST chance that it would be damaged in transit, so I wrapped it in multiple layers of felt and plastic bags and tied it all in place with twine. Through the twine I stuck an addressed letter in both English and French, basically saying "Dear customs people, I realize the odds are extremely good that you'll have to open this but it's really fragile and very literally irreplaceable so if you do can you please rewrap it, all my thanks", and then I boxed the whole thing up with some other stuff and sent it on its way.

While it was in transit, I mentioned this to the recipient, who told me she appreciated the thought but it could never work because French officials were notorious for careless handling. I'd already been anxious about sending it, and the possibility that they'd just be zipping through stuff at the speed of light and leave it susceptible to damage--now that anxiety was ratcheted up to high.

And then it arrived. The recipient sent me a pic and said "they didn't open it after all." The thing is.

When I'd wrapped it, the last layer on the outside was plastic. When it arrived the letter had been opened and set elsewhere in the box, and the carefully-wrapped layer on the outside was felt.

They had indeed opened it. And then, just as I'd asked, hoped, had very neatly wrapped it again. All seven or eight layers. The twine hadn't been retied, but it didn't matter--there were enough layers to hold it together.

One day a few years ago, some civil servant in French Customs saw this letter carefully written in the clearest possible handwriting in two languages, and the care with which everything in the box had been packed, and took a couple of minutes out of their day to say "I can be someone's hero today" and helped to protect a treasure for the last few miles with as much care as if it were their own package going to their own dear friend.

(It arrived in perfect shape.)

Anyway I know that official will never know how happy they made me, to know that they saw and cared that it mattered to me. But I hope that somewhere, sometime, someone pays forward to them the kindness they showed not just to a pair of strangers, but a pair of strangers they could never possibly hope to meet, and I hope it inspires you to remember you never know when a little thing will mean a lot to someone.

This is hard for me to remember on a minute-by-minute basis, but when I visit insta/threads/twitter/tiktok/googlenews/etc, I am seeing a feed of information that does not reflect a complicated and multivalent reality but instead was created by an algorithm designed to maximize the amount of time that I spend on social media sites.

These algorithms do not give a shit what is true or useful or humane; they want me in bed spending as much time on those feeds as they can possibly get me to spend.

For example, if your information feed fails to remind you that global literacy rates have never been higher, that fewer children are stunted due to malnutrition, and that the rate of child mortality is the lowest it has been in human history ... there is something inadequate about your information feed.

But of course the fact that the world used to suck more doesn't negate the fact that the world still sucks (and in important ways sucks more than it did ten or thirty years ago). Injustice permeates every facet of human-built systems and social orders. This should dishearten us. It should anger us. But the proper response to this anger, imo, is not idle despair but engagement.

Progress happens (and it does happen) when hundreds of millions or billions of people work together to make it happen. We reduced the likelihood of a child dying by 65% over the last 30 years not because it was inevitable or ordinary but because hundreds of millions of people refused to accept so much needless suffering and built more inclusive systems to expand access to healthcare, clean water, and adequate nutrition.