Guest blogger Fred Blair offers this story:
Once upon a time a community had a sandbox. The community rules provided that only one kid at a time could play in the sandbox. Periodically the kids would compete for that privilege, dancing up and down, running around madly and yelling “Pick me! Pick me!” The nastier kids competed by saying not how good they were, but how bad the others were.
When a kid was picked, he spent his allotted time seeing to the operation of the sandbox and sometimes improving the way things looked, and occasionally even how they worked. Then when selection time rolled around again, he would cry “Pick me, Pick me! Look what a great job I did last time!”
Generally the system worked well for the community, although it must be said that some odd kids got picked from time to time.
Then one particular kid got into the sandbox, in part by telling egregious lies about how awful all the others were. He immediately set out to give an impression of industry and virtue, partly by fiddling with things that already worked pretty well, but mostly by spending huge amounts of time and energy on telling everyone in the community how well he was doing. On the whole he didn’t get much of substance done, but with all the self-congratulatory noise he made, it was hard to tell.
All the time he was fiddling and advertising, he was also working quietly to subvert the selection process to ensure that he would have a better chance of continuing in the sandbox. He made it very hard to tell exactly what he was doing there by hiding or disguising various plans and activities. He also reduced the community resources available to assess and comment on his performance. Then he identified people in the community who he thought were likely to be against him, and changed the rules so that they wouldn’t have a say when the next selection time came along.
The community was usually tolerant, even casual, about activities in the sandbox. But as this kid’s agenda became more and more obvious, community concern began to grow.
How does the story end?
It ends with a whole lot of children deciding that another little boy should take over the sandbox…
I don’t know how the story will end, but I do know the name of the kid.
In Canada a new rule would be put in place to ensure that “odd kids” would be a majority of those chosen. In US a new rule would be put in place to ensure that no odd kids would ever be chosen.
A close group of sandbox children collected a supply of cookies, packed their shovels and went looking until they found a beach. And they lived happily ever after.
What do you do with a kid who keeps throwing sand in everybody’s eyes?
Mr. Blair, good story! And Mr. Gundy, nice coda. If I get it: beach = the commons; sandbox = enclosure of the commons.
Mr. Mayer, would you consider that in Canada, as elsewhere, “odd kids” = almost all of us? That a new Canadian rule would ensure our oddnesses get reflected proportionately when we choose who’ll act for us on our shared beaches and in our sandboxes?
Could another rule be that we recollect, sometimes, that each of us is a daughter or son of a beach? And we’re all beachkeepers?
Question: Who builds sandboxes, anyway? Who gets to patch them, decommission them when they’re over? Re-do ones that suit us now?