Yesterday I was browsing the library catalog, looking at books of trivia to see what sorts of books there were. Which is how I found The Essential Book of Presidential Trivia, a book published in 2006 by Noah McCullough, who was apparently ten years old at the time. He published First Kids: the true stories of all the presidents’ children 2 years later. Scholastic has this page about him and his political hopes etc. It’s kind of encouraging; I don’t know how long he’ll be able to retain his focus on altruism/being of service/living as a good example for others, given the nature of politics. But I want to believe that it’s a good starting point. The fact that he is (was?) interested in funding medical research and dealing with the problem of Social Security is also interesting. Given the political/social climate of the past week, I want to ask him grittier questions. Like, Hey. You’re apparently 20 years old now, for one thing, and maybe you should have Amazon update your author info. But also: what aspects of history have horrified you most? What are you most committed to changing? How would you address the terrible things that happened this week?
...recognizing that 10 years have passed since he first published is sort of odd. The qualities or interests that might have just seemed cute then are now the blocks of his character and all that.