Djelloul Marbrook

Now that our planet, a betrayed beloved, is strongly suggesting to us
that unremitting consumerism may just dig us a hole to hell, we might learn a new way of living from the resourcefulness of children.

Have you noticed how children build whole worlds with stick and stones, how they improvise, making magic circles, giving strange animals decent burials? Have you noticed how much they see that adults don’t even think worthy of seeing, just as adults haven’t seen the rape of the planet worthy of their hifalutin attention?

Well, what if we suspended our belief in children as little incompetents and saw them as little visitors from a better place, or at least a smarter place? What if we saw, if even for a few moments, that these little visitors are unencumbered by our received ideas, which have gotten us into a mess?

For example, they don’t worry about lower taxes, the color of a person’s skin, immigrants, market corrections or even patriotism. No, they have larger concerns, much larger. They are concerned with the next thing that might bring delight and wonder into their lives. They have angels’ concerns. But their concerns strike us as, well, childish, while our contempt for the surface and climate of the earth is adult.

We think we know what we’re doing, but children don’t bother to justify what they’re doing. We say that’s immaturity, lack of a morale structure. They have to be taught to do what we do, because we of course know what we’re doing. But they see with new eyes, the very eyes we need to change our catastrophic course.

Children are our very course correction, if we but consider them.—DM