Blog Your Blessings: The Perfect Life is the one you Live

Monday offered a splendid moment that fueled my entire week with pure happiness. I had an eighth-grade class read a New York Times article (yes, the illiterati can do this) about a drug scientists are developing that can enhance and erase memory. An injection of this stuff and that pesky addition to drugs is gone. That memory of a terrible crime is erased. The Bad Day file cabinet gets dumped on the fire. Conversely, the drug might be used to improve learning and therefore improve the quality of life.

We discussed the pros and cons. Right away the boys thought of all those CIA operatives who could be medicated instead of eliminated. They thought of rape victims whose peace of mind could be restored. They thought of how well they might do in school with a shot of this stuff.
We could become designer people. So the children realized.

My mind shot back to a story I read a few years ago in the Atlantic that discussed IVF clients who seek out the just right young ladies--Ivy League students with great bodies and good family backgrounds, for example--to donate their eggs for implantation. Eugenics by another name. But, Sandy, keep your mind on the task at hand. Listen to your students....

Amid the chatter of students imaging the perfect, albeit medicated, life, one quiet, ponderous, sweet, and gentle boy put up his hand. "But, Miss," he said in the low tone that stops the presses ever time. Listen, everybody. "Miss," he said, "you can't do that. You can't do that because you are what you remember--that's who you are."

That's who you are. Live it.

Thank you, sweet boy for whom being principled is pure common sense.

Blog Your Blessings