I'm coming gradually to think, or to feel, that children are basically it. That the important part of what humanity does is what it does, what it is, when it is children. That once you're, say, 16 or 18 years old, you're done with the important part, and now you're just part of the infrastructure, doing law enforcement and writing and technology and health-care and bricklaying and procreation so that the next generation of the important people, the children, will have a good time.

This means that teachers, for instance, are both sort of holy and sort of amazingly lucky. They're up there on the front line, working with the people who matter, and having a good deal to do with shaping the experiences that matter.

This means that I, sitting here working on Perl scripts and doing computer security stuff, am pretty far from where the main action is. But so are most people. The guys who took care of the horses that were used to pull the wagons that were used in maintaining the roads that led from the quarries to the construction site where they were building the Tower of Babel probably didn't spend too much time thinking about how far removed their work was from the building of the Tower. They just got up in the morning, had pizza, and got out the mucking tools and the currycombs. But still the Tower was there down the road, climbing slowly up, and without it all the currying and shoeing would have been without an ultimate point.