Member-only story
America Is Creating Its Own National Disaster
We’re going backwards on purpose.
My younger son Wynn is a sixth grader on his middle school basketball team. Wynn’s a year younger than most kids in his class, and he’s not the scion of retired NBA All-Stars, and he’s a sixth grader in a league of eighth graders, so he’s small: The smallest kid on the team. How small?
This small:
I was honestly surprised he made it onto the roster at all, but I was proud that he did, and he has loved it. He rarely plays, but when he does, he plays hard, and just as important, he has fully embraced what it means to be on a team, to be a teammate, to hang out all week with a bunch of kids from different backgrounds whom he otherwise likely wouldn’t cross paths with in his daily life, to come together with them in pursuit of a common goal. It has been good for him. It has been good for all of them.
Our middle school, thanks to an increase in public funding voted on by our community, just went through a massive renovation, one that has taken two full years. My older son, who’s in the eighth grade and now just one semester away from high school, entered school right when…
