Blog/2026-04-20/Drops of Water
When we were kids there was this nursery rhyme we had about how small actions eventually sum up to large results.
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
Recently, I must confess to feeling a bit like a sucker (a thing my friends will tell you I hate), with it seeming like everyone in the US is committing tax fraud, insider trading, or just wholesale manipulation of the stock and futures markets. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here like a schmuck carefully filing my taxes and not drawing from the PPP or what have you. This sort of thing always starts making me feel anti-social. That's obviously unreasonable. The vast majority of Americans are just sitting there paying their W-2 taxes, and the vast majority of the people in my socio-economic class are just happily going to their jobs in tech where they're making lots of money and just paying their taxes without much though.
That's the fact, but it doesn't have quite as much of a visceral effect because there's no news of some chap just working and filing his taxes. In fact, that chap, since he's spending his time working and getting better at all that is probably doing a better job of making more money most of the time than the fellow worrying about trying to defraud the government of taxes. But what does have a visceral effect is seeing someone do what is obviously the right thing to do in a place where there are lots of people not doing the right thing.
Yesterday, while walking up 4th Street back home from the playground, we found ourselves walking behind a couple with a big white dog. Now normally dog people in SF are a bit of an anti-social bunch in terms of use of the commons, but this was a striking opposite. The man was carrying a trash bag and one of those arms that have a little trigger to grab trash and as he was walking by he'd pick up some of what he saw and put it in the bag. What was interesting was that the rubbish bin at 4th and King on the South Side was vandalized - someone had pulled the trash bin out and strewn the contents all over the place. This chap kept his pace, grabbed some things, and kept going. Not all of the things, just some of the things. And I liked that. There's a lot we can do to make everything around us a little less un-nice.
I like to think of myself anyway as the kind of person who would pick up a fallen bicycle or scooter blocking the path, or who would put the bin back in its place if I saw it. But in this case, I absolutely had to! A little adroit manoeuvring with my foot and I was able to put it back and slam the door shut. So we can say that good behaviour at least has an because it infected one more person. So I'm happy that person exists and I'm glad they crossed my path. And if we're lucky, maybe others will do more and we'll have the mighty ocean.
