Dear ECS: Love is Progress, Hate is Expensive

Dear ECS,

Hey honey, it has been too long since I wrote to you.  We have just been having too much fun together, and with your mommy, and with our many loved ones that we have seen, stayed with us or traveled with over the last month. 

You have been a delight, per usual.   Your sense of humor is acute and incisive; made all the better when you state matter of fact “I’m funny!” Your empathy is also heart warming, as you leave a wake of smiles in your rearview mirror.  Over the last month, your vocabulary has increased exponentially-- everyday it seems like you say a new word that neither of us taught you.  For example, a couple of weeks ago, you were waking up and said ‘boogers’ all on your own.  That really cracked me up.  And you have become quite the runner – telling us at every opportunity that you “run fast.” And you do.

The title of this letter comes from an exhibit I saw at the African American History Museum a few weeks ago.  It is a phrase created by a civil rights activist in Charleston named Esau Jenkins (https://www.preservationsociety.org/blog/2015/08/31/testt/).  He wrote the saying on a bus used to integrate a high school in Charleston before buses were directed to that aim by the school board.  At the museum, a panel from this bus is on display, a vivid reminder among so many at the museums of our collective history and the nearly unfathomable effort and sacrifice so many made to move the entire country forward.

“Love is Progress, Hate is Expensive” stuck with me and is a compact motto of an ideal you seem to embrace already at the tender age of one.  Why not love?  It is additive, and expansive and makes the world better.  Who doesn’t want to be loved, or to love? 

But hate?  That is a negative all across the board, who wants to be hated?  Who does hating help?  Not the hater or the hated.  It imposes costs without any benefits.

You have the spirit of love deep in your every growing vocabulary.  In your squeals of delight at home and at school, in your big hugs for baby Teddy who stayed with us last week.  In your wonder at the sea lions at the zoo (they are wondrous). In your request for your cousins as your first word upon waking up while they visited from Tennessee.  You love love love people and life, and all I can say is keep it up girl.

love,

dad