It's a small wonder, a miracle indeed, when they discover an aspect of "we," often at first stumbling across it like over a super cool toy left in the middle of the living room floor.

Even if it's as simple as saying, "We are going up here now." Even that gives me confidence about our future.

The ones with siblings just a little bit older tend to learn it first, the joy of connecting with another child, and find their classmates a little slow sometimes. These are the ones who might take the lead, practicing the sentences that begin with the invitation of "Let's . . .," working their human power to bring themselves together with those other suns around whom the universe so recently revolved.

This is the work we're here to do: to make me into we, because otherwise it makes no sense. 

There are things, so many things, over which to disagree. It's hard enough learning how to do that without having to also overcome closed minds that reject the universal language of objective "scientific" truth in favor of illogical propaganda. The same is to be said for that set of moral values we must share if we're to make this democracy work, let alone our day-to-day lives: non-violence, equal opportunity, fairness, the values without which the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness simply cannot be fulfilled.

It's true we attempt in school to transmit our "accumulated knowledge," but without also working diligently to transmit the "accumulated experience of social living," we risk creating sociopathic monsters, people rendered less human in their inability to join us in our work of making me into we. They instead seek to exploit, to use up, to devour their fellow man in a dangerously misguided attempt to fill up that abyss that opens inside each of us when we stand all alone in the world. If we don't fill it with love, it becomes a vacuum for wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.