While there are many reasons throughout my life for my feeling like the proverbial “fish out of water” one of the more interesting is the fact that I was born on the cusp of two wildly disparate generational cohorts. While I am technically a Baby Boomer, I only qualify by mere months. As a result, I have always felt more aligned with GenX sensibilities. Apparently, there is also a new classification called Generation Jones for people like me.
Nevertheless, this dual generational citizenship has proved interesting in terms of the children’s literature that exerted influence upon me during my formative years. Therefore, though largely having fallen out of favor for being everything from irrelevant to mildly racist, the stories of Dr. Seuss were still an acceptable vehicle for teaching reading as well as some often not-so-subtle lessons on the state of the society in which “late Boomer – early Xer” individuals like myself were required to inhabit.
One of my favorite Seuss selections was titled, quite simply, “The Sneetches.” For those uninitiated in what I like to call “Seussology”, a Sneetch was a fanciful, rather furry-looking creature, which I always thought rather resembled another more famous, though decidedly gloomier (at least initially) character known as Mr. Grinch.
The basic storyline is that Sneetches come in two-varieties: those who sport stars on their bellies and those who do not. And while the stars appear to be a mere accident of birth, the star-bellied Sneetches view themselves as superior to their plain-bellied brethren, pointedly excluding them from marshmallow roasts that took place on the beaches of some unnamed land and which were apparently more segregated than 1950s country clubs.
I will avoid offering any spoilers in case there is anyone out there who would like to experience this retro cautionary tale firsthand. However, there was always one aspect of the story that troubled my 7-year-old self and even today, more than a half-century later, troubles me still and that is this: instead of internalizing the purely imaginary inferiority resulting from their starless abdominal state, why didn’t the plain-bellied Sneetches simply ignore the non-sensical snobbery of the Sneetches with stars and retire to a more hospitable set of beaches where they could eschew the hopelessly banal pastime of toasting disgusting sweet and undoubtedly unhealthy marshmallows and embrace way cooler activities, which they could enjoy proudly in all of their plain-bellied glory?
With the current political climate in the United States in which women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community are facing the threat of losing many of our hard-won civil rights and immigrants are facing threats of deportation, denaturalization, and loss of birthright citizenship, the tale of the Sneetches is likely about to become much more relevant. So, to all of my (metaphorically speaking) plain-bellied Sneetch brothers and sisters, let’s not mope around on the beaches feeling left out and blocked from living our best lives. Let’s unite, pool our resources to ensure our safety, educational opportunities, and financial prosperity! Let’s show the star-bellied Sneetches of the world (whom today I suspect might be sporting infamous red hats in addition to their stars) that we don’t care about their exclusionary tactics. If our lives are full and not fueled by hate and grievance, perhaps they will find themselves yearning to be like us, rather than the other way around.
quietlyradical 