I have a strong memory of a film we watched in third grade about the end of the world. In this film, either air pollution or acid rain-- or maybe the loss of the ozone layer-- had caused drastic changes for life on planet Earth.
Needless to say, I don’t really remember the details well. I spent a lot of time in third grade in the principal’s office. Or standing on the teacher’s desk when she wasn’t in the room. Or, one notable time, running out one door and in another one during recess repeatedly until I was sent to the office and made to write a letter home to my parents that informed them what kind of horrible child I was-- as if they were unaware. The fact is, I wasn’t actually that bad of a third-grader. I mean, I was probably only the third-worst bully on the playground-- and that’s only because I was bad at sports. But I digress.
The point is, I remember this video from third grade about the end of the world. And it’s coming up in my mind these days for the obvious reasons.
The narrative device was this: You are watching a surviving human walking through a natural history museum. A voice-over narrator explained what was wrong with pollution, or acid rain, or whatever it was we were supposed to be scared of. The surviving human was walking through a series of displays.. You couldn’t see what he was looking at because his head was covered by this **Space Helmet** that we were told he had to wear to be safe because of the air pollution or the acid rain or whatever. And he was wearing some kind of crazy tin-foil jumpsuit, too. And had tubes plugged into his suit and helmet and stuff. I don’t know. Even excepting for the low budget nature of educational filmmaking in the 1980’s, it seemed pretty cheap. I had seen Close Encounters by that point, so I was kind of a film snob. My family had a VCR. We’d seen several films by that point. Maybe.
I remember watching it and thinking that it was kind of stupid; a space helmet wasn’t really the optimum design for every-day life in a hostile environment, you know? It would be like a knight walking around in a full-plate mask to keep the mosquitos off him.
But that wasn’t the part of the video that really made me mad. Here’s the part that made me mad: The man, as he walks through the museum, he comes across a diorama of a mule deer standing in a prairie. The man staggers when he sees the deer, and then the film cuts to a close up of the deer’s poorly taxidermied face. And then the film cuts back to the man, and he has his hands on his helmet as if he’s sobbing.
At this point, I was livid.
No human being who has successfully acclimated to living on a hostile Earth that requires the continued use of a fully-enclosed respiratory helmet would put his hands on his face when he was sad.
This man was not a survivor. He was an idiot. An idiot who cried at a deer. And I have hated him for thirty years.
But now, today, in the Spring of 2020, I find myself about to rub my eyes or chin every thirty seconds. And I think of that. And I am angry at third grade all over again.
I am angry, you guys. And I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to be standing together united and feeling like we can get through this together, and I don’t disagree with that. But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry. Every effing time I hear some idiot spreading bad information, or talking brave and bold in the empty toilet paper aisle, I get so mad.
But what stops me is this: People have always been idiots. People are not survivors. They are idiots who cry at deer. Walt Disney scientifically proved this. The case study was titled “Bambi.” And the dear, for what it’s worth, fine. Well, the ones that didn’t die of chronic wasting disease in the early 2000’s.
At the end of the day, you can’t reason with someone who is insistent that they are right and you are wrong. And it doesn’t do any good to try to educate them out of crying at deer. All you can do is love them for it. All you can do is hope that they take that sadness and transform it into something more useful.
Alchemy, amirite?
So… long story short-- too late-- I hope you find the wisdom you can learn from the things you experience in the past and coming months. Take the present moments of uncertainty and confusion and fear and anger and remember that you are in control of your experience. You choose whether the deer makes you cry. And whatever you choose, that’s ok. Just learn from the experience. Be better.