I live on the corner of a small lot abundant with trees and things that grow. During their daily walks, the neighborhood dogs dally when they round our corner, sniffing at the gravel separating pavement from nature. Many of them leaving their calling cards. As a humorous reminder to the leashed bipeds being led about by their canine companions, I placed a small sign at a more popular location in the collaborative circumnavigation of the block. “There is no poop fairy,” it reads. There is a small picture of a fairy and a gentle request that owners clean up after their furry friends.
“We thought it said ‘poop fairly’.”
One of our neighbors had houseguests who misread the sign while driving by. We all got a big kick out of the misunderstanding. It was, perhaps, more apt than one might initially think.
It is easy to travel the byways of being relatively inattentive to the debris we leave behind. Of course, not everything saved by the universe in the wake of travels is discard. There is plenty of good. Some of us are even more intentional about leaving the places and communities wherein we live better than when we first found them – or found ourselves active within them. Unfortunately, however, most of us have ample space to improve; we jettison what we no longer need or want without sufficient regard for who or what may follow. Or when. And, make no mistake, “when” does more than await. It arrives. When becomes now becomes past all too quickly, even suddenly. Tomorrow rushes toward today with inevitable urgency. Thus we might better consider the consequences of our oversights in current moments, accidental or not, as the refuse we rush from in the present too quickly transform into the quagmires and quandaries of the generations growing into maturity behind us.
The metaphor of pooping fairly is funny when referring to the droppings of dogs. It is less amusing when applied to human behavior on planet earth. For we must not avert our eyes (and noses) to the truth simply because it shocks our more delicate sensibilities: there is no poop fairy magically working out of sight and off camera to clean up the messes of our selfish disregard. We must learn to be those fairies. Better still, we must try harder to reduce the need for poop fairyness.
I get tired sometimes – of the weight of it all. There is so much to improve. As human populations grow, as our capacity to harm each other and our local and global environment expands with almost exponential influence, I sometimes feel like retreating inside the bubble of my secure and relatively safe existence. There are missiles arcing through the lower atmosphere in places I have never visited. There is evidence readily available at the click of a remote control on the suffering and seemingly endless inhumanity besetting communities near and far. What impact can someone such as I have in a world with so much strife, so much hatred, so much hopelessness? Why should I, or you, or any of us delude ourselves into imagining that our little corners of being make a difference when the real decisions, the big levers of survival decision-making, rest with those who pull triggers, push buttons, authorize brutality, and engage in cycles of retribution and vengeance that will, if unchecked, threaten the very existence of humans and all biological lifeforms as we may know them?
Because collective fairness feeds on our individual fairyness. That’s right: you heard it correctly. Communal and collective fairness is fed by the routine and very personal acts of selfless fairies like you and me. The whole – what some call “humanity” – is not some distant, disturbingly separate and unapproachable cloud of impossibly impenetrable ideas and experience. It is the sum, no the synergy, of all the simple and wonderfully tangible touches and triumphantly kind decisions we make each and every day. There is no doubt that human behavior can be horrid. There is no question that bleak and barren conduct confronts compassion and kindness with fatiguing regularity. But just because it is does not mean it must always be. You, me, all of us can and do make a difference – together we all must make a difference – in order for hope to be more than a feeling and instead become a reason, a cause, a collective commitment.
My dog sniffs at the passings of her compatriots every time we exit our driveway. She interprets a language comprehensible only to her kind. I, on the other hand, observe the effect of one tiny sign on the actions of an entire neighborhood of dog owners. They have all become poop fairies. Maybe, if together we leave and heed tiny empathic reminders for each other of our common destiny and capability, our minute acts of fairyness can inspire fairness for generations, even millennia, to come.