Learning From A Child Who Could Not Speak

"I tell you the truth, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it."
- Mark 10:15

"Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own"
- from "God Bless The Child" by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr.

Back when I had started college, I worked as a bagger at a grocery store in the Detroit area. The store was near a housing project, and it provided a novel economic opportunity for some of the project residents. A handful of young boys from the project hung around the store in order to earn tips by helping customers load their groceries into their cars. This most micro of micro economies was fueled by pocket change, but that was enough to provide these boys with some treats.

One of these boys working for tips stood out for several reasons, most noticeably because this boy was unable to communicate by speech. I'm not sure why, but his attempts at speaking was unintelligible grunts that conveyed emotions, but nobody could make out the words. He used to communicate with his own set of hand gestures, sort of like a pidgin sign language, that the people who knew him quickly learned.

But what I found most remarkable was that he was by far the most cheerful person I have ever met. He was always very upbeat when working his ersatz job. He was always smiling, and he always greeted me (using his "hello" gesture) with a big grin. I found his positive attitude admirable, and as strange as it might sound, I sort of envied him. At college, I met people from good (sometimes privileged) backgrounds with lots of potential who were miserable. And yet this kid, raised in poverty and with a serious disability, was a constant ray of sunshine. What was the secret of his upbeat view of life?

The cynical explanation would be that his optimism is rooted in naivete; he simply does not understand how bad his situation is. But look at things from his point of view. He really enjoyed helping people, he took pride in doing what he loved, and on top of it, he earned spending money. He sees a lot of positives in his life that most of us would overlook.

In fact, a lot of humanity suffer from unwarranted pessimism. In Bryan Caplan's excellent book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies", Professor Caplan notes that pessimism is one of the more common biases of voters. The public tends to overestimate the severity of contemporary problems, while idealizing conditions in the past and in other countries. Gilbert and Sullivan parodied this bias in "The Mikado", where Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko includes in his little list of potential victims

"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own"

Let's face it, most people don't appreciate the positives in their lives until those positives become part of their past. But not this kid earning tips at the grocery store; he fully appreciated life as it was happening. He had a disability that prevented him from speaking, but lacked the common disability of pessimism. I feel like I learned something valuable from him, and he taught it to me without saying a word.