She didn’t want any trouble. She didn’t want to screw up her girls’ education or their burgeoning business. She didn’t want powerful enemies. She didn’t want her husband to bite off more than he could chew.
But in Claire Keegan’s beautiful and haunting book Small Things Like These, Bill Furlong can’t help himself. He had seen something that alarmed him. He was worried that the church in their community—in this case 80’s Dublin–was not protecting the kids in its care.
Leave it alone, his wife said. It’s too risky…what if you’re wrong? “It’s only people with no children that can afford to be careless,” she said. Her husband, an orphan who’d been taken in by a kindly old woman, had trouble turning away from a suffering child. “But what if it was one of ours?” he replied. “This is the very thing I am saying,” his wife replied, as so many of us have said to something we heard about or saw. “Tis not one of ours.”
This is something we talk about in The Daily Dad book (grab the new leatherbound edition here), we talk how in the better times, when people would talk of doing something for “the kids” they were referring to the whole neighborhood not just their own. They were speaking generationally. They were speaking about kids they didn’t even know. But today? In dysfunctional and selfish societies? Too often we’re referring only to those kids genetically related to us. We’re referring to our people.
We have to remember that courage and justice—the two most essential Stoic virtues—demand that we open our hearts and direct our actions at a slightly larger purview. We have to act, as Furlong—the husband in Keegan’s book—did, as if that suffering child was one ours. What if we lived in Ukraine or Gaza or Israel? What if our child was the one being sent to inferior schools due to the color of their skin? What if our child was being bullied because of their orientation or because they were neurodivergent?
We have to be brave. We have to care. We have to stand up and do what’s right for “our kids,” the ones within our family, yes, but also our community, our country and our world.
P.S. We highly recommend picking up Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which we recently chose for our book club we do over at The Painted Porch—you can grab your own copy from the bookstore here. It’s a short and powerful read that will stay with you long after you turn the final page and remind you of the importance of doing something for “our kids.”
