Last month, I attended a panel presentation at the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco, led by Ivory, Bob Cauthorn, and Mark Coker. The topic was "Plugging Into Digital Publishing: Where Do Freelance Writers Plug In?" The content was informative, all three panelists were engaging, I left feeling energized to publish online, and [reader: mentally insert other assorted praise here].

This blog post is not about the panel, though I could write at great length about its value; hence my catch all, fill-in-the-blank compliment above. Instead, I am writing about something Ivory said there: "The Red Room is like a megaphone with an octopus coming out of it; it provides a forum for you, writers, to amplify your message and expand your reach."

I loved that simile so much, I almost married it. I immediately started mentally applying it to all aspects of life. In the lives best lived, real-life protagonists continuously propel themselves from the tentacles of an octopus squeezed into a megaphone.

If an octopus were extending me into the atmosphere, allowing my most deeply felt principle to blare from the megaphone in which she sat, I know what message I would broadcast. I would share that every child, everywhere, needs more empowerment than our global village provides.

In my view, this responsibility does not fall only upon the shoulders of parents. I embrace the trite but apt expression, "It takes a village to raise a child." It does. No set of parents/guardians, or no single parent/guardian, can do it alone.

The children in Kawangware, the slum in the outskirts of Nairobi that I visited this summer, are possessed of a spiritual wealth that I wish for our children here. Their joy is profound, and it stems from someplace deep within. I know this because their external circumstances are devastating: ravaging poverty, resulting in starvation and dehydration; rampant, largely untreated disease; and shocking, naked-eye-visible pollution. These are only a few of the harsh conditions I witnessed.

When I walked into a classroom at an unaccredited school, construction paper in my arms, the children screamed and clapped. When they found out they would each receive their own pieces, their eyes twinkled as if all their dreams had come true. And they couldn't tell me enough times how loved they felt by my presence with them.

Thankfully, American children have water to drink, and that water is not contaminated. (While some would debate this point, it is at least true in relative terms.) They have food. They have so much construction paper, and countless consumer items "cooler" than that, they tire of it more easily than the children of Kawangware do - that is, when they notice it at all.

I generalize, but the disparity between cultures is shocking. Our work is never done, and that there's no way of parenting - nor any one culture - that perfectly raises children to love themselves and others fully, and also to have every basic need and material item they need to thrive. There is a balance, and I think we can never stop working to attain it.

That is my message for the octopus-affixed megaphone. One arm down, seven more to go ...