Parenting & Family Quote by David Dinkins

There is a particular kind of civic vertigo in admitting you’re “in charge of children” you haven’t even met. David Dinkins, the understated, decorous New York politician, frames public office not as power but as a custodial obligation that arrives before intimacy, before names, before faces. The line turns the abstract idea of “the public” into the most morally loaded constituency imaginable: kids. It’s a rhetorical move that quietly indicts the way politics so often hides behind spreadsheets and slogans. Children are the one group you can’t plausibly blame for the city’s problems, and the one group you can’t credibly abandon without giving away the ethical game.

The subtext is also about distance. A mayor governs millions through institutions, budgets, school systems, policing, housing policy - structures that affect childhood long before any handshake in a photo op. Dinkins acknowledges the asymmetry: the governed are real and particular; the governor meets them, if at all, after decisions have already shaped their lives. That awareness acts as a self-imposed check on ego. He’s not claiming omniscience; he’s confessing the unsettling nature of authority exercised over strangers.

In Dinkins’s New York - early 1990s, defined by anxiety about crime, inequality, and the future of the city - the line reads as a rebuke to short-termism. You can’t “win the news cycle” for children you’ll never encounter. You can only build (or fail to build) the conditions they’ll inherit.