Who Cares

. Care is about meeting needs, and it is always relational: the skinned knee of a child who fell off his bike isn’t only about scrapes and germs, it is also about creating the conditions for him to feel safe in the world.

Neediness is not a natural thing: There is a “politics of needs interpretation” that makes some needs politically disabling compared to others

The most important resource for caring is time.

as the only form of responsibility, personal responsibility can have a profoundly antidemocratic effect.

mean, as Berenice Fisher and I defined it some time ago, “in the most general sense, care is a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”1