Be Willing to Become a Sneetch

It’s week twenty-nine of our fifty week challenge, and the prompt was stars. The first thing I thought about was the Dr Seuss story The Sneetches. I wanted to emboss stars instead of trying to draw them. I created a much more elaborate first draft and didn’t really like it, so I paired things down for this version. The text is the last two lines of this classic children’s tale.

I reread this wonderful story and was reminded of how on point Dr Seuss was in all his writings. Some Sneetches were obsessed with being better than the other Sneetches, so the story goes on to remind us of the wastefulness of status. The challenge is that we still haven’t internalized this message enough to learn and change. We let the media, social pressure and what we think other people think is important rule our decision making processes.

We want to believe we think for ourselves, yet in reality only a few of us actually do. Our thoughts, ideas, preferences, beliefs and habits are a tangled web of everything we see, read and hear. Most of it influences us without any need for our permission, we turn over our minds willingly never understanding what we have given away so freely.

Some of us get it. We have chosen to live a life without concern for who has a star “upon thars”. We had to give up a few things in order for that to happen. We gave up what people think, watching the news, we’ve chosen to live blissfully uninformed and we make different choices than other people. We know what we believe, we know what we want, and we are willing to make decisions to support all that. We are the Sneetches that forgot about stars. If you don’t understand do something radical, open the Dr Seuss book and read the story, be willing to become a Sneetch.