The focus of my work, over more than half a century, has been on getting good things to happen and/or preventing harm from happening. It has been a mixed history that includes both successes and failures; victories and defeats.

Upon reflection, two themes emerge. The first is my emphasis on children, parents and people of childbearing age. The second is that I have spent far less time and energy combatting “evil” than striving to overcome “The Three Is”: Ignorance, Indifference and Inertia.

Much of my life’s work has been dedicated to surmounting the amorphous — but still profoundly negative — consequences of inaction. For example, imagine Mark intentionally threw a child into the deep end of a pool knowing the child could not swim. Mark committed an action that would be universally reviled. Instead, what if Mark was the only person around when the child accidentally slipped and fell into the deep end – and Mark (a good swimmer) heard the child scream, saw the child starting to drown… and yet chose to do nothing? Wouldn’t Mark’s inaction also be both harmful and reprehensible?

Mark’s pernicious inaction writ large is what I witnessed in North Carolina decades ago. I was president of the NC Child Advocacy Institute when the Leandro case came before the state’s Supreme Court. In a landmark, progressive decision, the Justices ruled that every child in North Carolina has an equal constitutional right to receive a “sound, basic education” beginning in early childhood. The Court ordered that its Leandro Decision be fully implemented without delay. Hundreds of millions of dollars........

© Pearls and Irritations