Alice Needn’t Know
I made a deal with myself to keep an eye out, but if no one showed I didn’t have a strategy. What would I do then?
How to compute the cost of a less than perfect world? How about the cost of a world far, far less than perfect… even perversely imperfect?
Okay, it’s true that some natural imperfections are in large part out of our control; like say a hurricane, a volcano, or an earthquake. I’m not saying we need to take those off the table, but even if you add maladies like a heart attack or cancer, you could easily say that all these misfortunes are exceptional and hardly frequent or routine.
For our purposes here, I’m instead referring to those imperfections that are the result of human agency. What sort of costs and difficulties do we incur simply because we, and our fellow human beings, are imperfect and sometimes even maliciously evil.
Think about the locks on our doors, the keys in our cars, the cost of police, courts, fences, and armies. Every phone has a password, and we have attorneys galore. No window is without a latch and last year Americans bought nearly 20 million guns, and the year before that, and the year before that. Still, these are costs attributed only to the prevention of crime… but what if you had to compute the cost of the crime we’re trying to prevent — imagine the magnitude of that number.
And then there are other more serious expenses… the psychological costs of victimhood and violation. Why do we avoid alleys, fear the dark and resent the stare of a stranger?
How do you calculate the cost of life lost to violence?
The cost of human imperfection is huge, not just because its consequences can be dreadful, but because its presence is so pervasive and common.
However, this is the world we live in, and the world that we’ve made — a world perpetually mortgaged to our own fractured sense of self interest and the insidious appeal of evil done simply for the sake of evil.
Which brings me to a playground at Mill Creek Elementary School.
Late one afternoon this week I was stranded at McDonalds with Alice and Grace, my two four-year-old granddaughters. Lacking any ready form of transportation, we had to walk home, and the shortest route included this playground.
There, we stopped at the more junior of two play areas — the one with the lower monkey bars, shorter swings, and smaller slides. The other more senior play area was perhaps fifty yards away and it was partially obscured by the corner of a building. In that other play area was a small boy close to the same age as my granddaughters. It seemed odd that he was in a spot that didn’t match his age, but he seemed happy enough playing there alone. That is “alone” in the full sense of the word. Our line of sight included only him, with no adults.
That absence seemed odd, but any concern was diminished by the short time we’d been there and the belief that a mom, a dad or someone must be around somewhere. But a few minutes turned into ten, then fifteen and then more, and more… with still no sight of anyone overseeing that little boy.
I made a deal with myself to keep an eye out, but if no one showed I didn’t have a strategy. What would I do then? School was out, who could I talk to? In good conscience could I leave? How long could I be expected to stay. What if someone happened by and it wasn’t clear they were responsible for this child?
A variety of concerns and reservations began to seesaw in my mind. However, I assumed that this interior argument was mine alone to have. I was certain the girls were entirely oblivious, and happily so. But then Alice caught my attention with a tug.
“Isn’t anyone with that boy?” She asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, “someone must be looking after him.”
“Then where are they, grandpa?”
Equally confused, I repeated myself, “I don’t know.”
Then Alice shared this advice, “Let’s go over there grandpa. Maybe he needs a family.”
On the one hand, her advice was right on… the time had come for me to do more than just stand there and observe. She realized I needed to take the initiative. She needed to encourage her grandpa to do the right thing.
But that wasn’t all that undergirded her observation. Alice wasn’t merely wanting to go over there and put the matter to rest. No, from her perspective the essential concern wasn’t that he was presently without a care giver. For her, the worry was that he might not have a family — a problem we could easily solve by giving him one… ours.
I followed Alice’s advice, walked in the direction of the little boy and soon saw that his parents were standing in a place blocked by the building. All was well, yet I’ve thought about this moment repeatedly since it happened.
What, I’ve thought, is the world we’re giving to Alice, and what is the world that she assumes is ours?
Just how distorted and tangled have our affairs become, and why does an intention so obviously good, if quite naïve, seem so patently ridiculous?
The chasm that separates her world from ours is that her world lacks any reference to bad intentions. If bad fortune intrudes into her world, the simplest and most direct solution is the obvious choice. For Alice there is zero concern for petty matters like convenience, self interest or anyone’s lack of empathy and goodness. She thought that if we simply approached the boy, asked him if he had a family, and if he said that he didn’t have one we’d offer him ours… then what could possibly go wrong?
Why and how could such a decent thing be misunderstood or even frustrated… let alone prove dangerous to him, or to me?
That moment provided clear evidence of just how much we pay for our own brokenness. I wonder at all that makes humankind wonderful and unique: our intelligence, our curiosity, our ambition, and our occasional ability to stand outside ourselves and sacrifice for the benefit of others. That human flair for the beautiful, and our capacity to reflect on who we are and why we’re here. The unsupportable weight of realizing both our insignificance and our mortality, and then having the courage to make something out of what we don’t understand.
If we took all that good and put it on the scales to weigh against what we get so wrong, and the terrible hurt all that wrong generates, would the scales balance? Well, maybe, barely… perhaps at some indefinite point in the future.
But Alice needn’t know that, at least not now.