2: Who's Allowed to Be Human?

It's 14th of July 2019. This morning I have two hours in the diary to write. Writing is near the top of the list of the things that I love to do (alongside cooking, eating cake, travel, sunshine and hanging out with friends and family). I am reflecting on two passages of text that I read this morning and have cut and pasted below. I like to read when I write. I find the two inseparable. For a start there are far better writers in the world than I. And, in order to think about the world, I need others to have already written about the world. The first passage is an extract from the Vietnamese-American poet, essayist and novelist – Ocean Vuong's – beautiful novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and the other is from the POTUS himself, inevitably, pulled off his Twitter account: