As I held the furry gray and white body against my chest, a sense of warmth moved through me. This rabbit had been abandoned in the streets of Washington DC, sitting in her cage for God knows how long before being rescued. And yet she let me pick her up. She could have scratched or bitten me, but she just wanted to be held closely, with love. The fact that she felt safe around me was an honor.
While most of us have never been abandoned as completely as she was, we’ve all be hurt by people in some way or another. Yet like her, we need to rely on others.
As I ran, mulberries bounced out of my hand, trailing behind me as if I was some sort of fruit-based Hansel and Gretel. I paused in my run to pick mulberries from a neighbor’s tree – they littered the sidewalk, so they weren’t going to be missed – and had overestimated how many I could hold while jogging. Bringing them home, I announced, “Mulberries!” and dropped them in a plastic bowl. My older son ate them quickly, staining his mouth dark purple.
The computer screen showed a line drawing of the classic philosophical thought experiment called The Trolley Problem. Except instead of stick figure people tied to the railroad tracks like in the original version – which asks you to decide whether to redirect the trolley and save the 5 people on the tracks but kill a single person on the alternate track – it was a choice between you and five identical clones of you.
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting twist,” I commented to my older son, who was both laughing and seriously contemplating the moral implications of this ridiculous choice. It was one of a series of increasingly silly versions of the problem that he was futzing around with. I pointed out, “You know, a lot of people think the original version is silly too because it only offers those two awful choices. Which is true. I guess the thing is that it makes us think about who gets hurt in the decisions we make.”
While the trolley problem itself is ridiculous, there are plenty of versions of it in our society, like people who posit that we have to trade off between environmental protection and the economy. Or posit that to have a good life, we have to screw over Amazon workers so we can have overnight delivery. (In fact, one of the versions says “A trolley is heading towards one guy. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your Amazon package will be late. What do you do?”) Or that we don’t have an obligation to pay school taxes over a certain age because well, that’s not *our* responsibility. At that point, society is not even presenting us with an impossible choice – it’s saying that we don’t have to care at all. After all, it’s not our responsibility if the trolley is going to run someone over.
The map on the wall at the Museum of Natural HIstory seemed small, dull even, compared to the wealth of excitement around it – dinosaur bones, wall-sized video displays, models of giant sloths! But what it showed was jaw-dropping.
It was a map of what would be underwater in the U.S. from sea level rise if climate change continues unabated.
The dog stretched its legs, sniffed around, and laid down to rest. All totally normal dog things. Except this one was made of metal and settled itself into a charging station. All of the kids watching from outside a window cried “Awww!” They were crying in wonder of not just a dog, but a robot dog! How cool is that, right? Maybe.
Once I pulled the kids away from the window and bought tickets to get in the Boston Museum of Science (where we were), I discovered that the robot dog was part of a larger artificial intelligence (AI) exhibit. I talk a lot about using AI for science in work, so I was intrigued. How was the Museum of Science going to explain AI in a way that was interesting to non-scientists?
I stared at my face being reflected back at me from a shining silver surface. Beyond my reflection, there was a photograph laser-etched in black that felt very familiar. Activists of all ages and races yelled and held signs declaring the “People’s Climate Movement” in front of the U.S. Capital.
“I was at this event! Heck, you were at this event!” I exclaimed to my seven year old. We were at an exhibit called “Look Here” at the National Building Museum (shush, it’s much cooler than it sounds). The piece of art combined giant kaleioscopic sculptures with huge metal versions of childhood fortune tellers. Some of the fortune tellers had surfaces printed with photos of historic events in Washington D.C. Other ones featured the 1964 March on Washington and the AIDS quilt.
But to see this one – a photo my kids and I could have been in – was startling. It put us in the company of other people marching on Washington who made history. We were part of that group. We were part of history.
As I tend to tell it, my environmentalism started with grief and anger, at the young age of 10. I visited Homasassa Springs State Park and saw manatees for the first time. Their huge size and gentle nature enchanted me. As I watched them, my parents had to nudge me insistently to get me to leave. The same day, reading the informational signs, I learned that they were terribly endangered. I signed up for the Save the Manatees club that day and told everyone I could get to listen to me about it.
But in reality, my environmentalism started years before that.
Kids fly down my street on their skateboards and bikes to the nearby community center and I smile and shake my head. “I do wish they’d be safer on their bikes,” I mutter to myself, but am glad that they can do so. I think back to my mom talking about how she’d walk around her town as a kid and take the bus to the movies in the next town over.
Sadly, I know my neighborhood is a relative rarity in American society.
Images have been created by Craig Froehle, Angus Maguire, the Center for Story-Based Strategy and the Interaction Institute for Social Change.
“But he’s spoiled!” my older son proclaimed loudly, expressing his opinion that his brother always gets what he wants.
Now, his claim is blatantly untrue. In fact, my older son is probably the one who gets what he wants more often just because he has stronger opinions. My younger son is more likely to say, “Yeah, sure, that sounds good.”
But I wasn’t going to get into that conversation. I knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere and just turn into the nonsense of trying to list every time that my older son got what he wanted.
Instead, I took a different angle. “Well, you know that we do try very hard to be fair. But fair doesn’t always mean equal.”
Sure, it addresses some mature themes like the patriarchy. But we talk about hard social issues all the time in our family.
Sure, my boys are explicitly not the target audience. But they read all sorts of stuff that centers girls and women, including Squirrel Girl comics and the Ramona books, and love them.
Sure, they won’t get all of the jokes. But that’s true in day to day life and they’ll get plenty of them, like Ken’s job being “beach.”
So I think they’d enjoy it.
But more importantly, I want them to be exposed to the messages it carries in such an accessible way.
