it’s a small world

New York World’s Fair. I’m eight years old

Now, what does an eight-year-old actually remember from a World’s Fair? Not the architecture. Not the “City of Tomorrow.” I remember there was a ride where boats went through a tunnel and puppets sang at you in seventeen languages. That’s it. That’s the whole memory. Disney built a monument to world peace and I walked away thinking that was pretty good, can we get a corn dog now.

It’s a Small World. You know the song. Everybody knows the song. You didn’t ask to know it — it’s just in you, like a vaccine. Walt Disney weaponized a children’s tune so effectively that sixty-plus years later, full-grown adults hear four notes of it and go “…no. No, don’t. Don’t put that in my head, I have things to do today.”

That ride should be in The Hague. It’s a human rights violation with a gift shop at the end.

So fast forward. I’m in my forties. I take my daughter to Disneyland. And of course — of course — we get on Small World. Same boats. Same dolls. Same seventeen-languages-one-song nightmare. Thirty years later, nothing’s changed, the ride’s not even wet in different places.

And I’m sitting there next to my little girl, fully expecting to be annoyed… and instead I get hit with something I did not see coming.

Because it still meant something. This dumb little boat ride, built for an eight-year-old’s attention span, was still saying the truest thing I’d heard all year: we’re all on the same boat. Literally. There’s a boat. It’s right there.

And look — I’m sixty-nine. I’ve watched this country spend the last twenty years finding increasingly creative ways to hate each other over zip codes and bumper stickers. So when I tell you a song designed for toddlers made more sense to me than the evening news, I need you to understand how bad it’s gotten out there.

Most guys my age, they retire, they get a boat, they take up golf, they bother their kids about grandchildren. Me? I started a political party.

Because nothing says “stable, well-adjusted retirement” like a sixty-nine-year-old former window salesman deciding he’s going to fix democracy.

I didn’t get the idea from a think tank. I didn’t get it from cable news. I got it from a singing French doll on a boat. That’s the origin story. That’s it. Somewhere there’s a guy with a law degree from Georgetown wondering why his policy paper isn’t landing, and meanwhile I’m out here going “have you people TRIED the boat song.”

But here’s the thing — it’s still true. It was true when I was eight watching it for the first time. It was true thirty years later holding my daughter’s hand on that same ride. And it’s true now, whether this room wants to admit it or not:

It IS a small world.

We just keep building bigger boats to avoid sitting in it together.