If I’m told this starfish story one more time by some overstuffed bureaucrat at a self-congratulatory banquet, I shall probably puke into my shrimp cocktail. It goes like this:
Millions of starfish washed up on the beach, putting their lives in grave danger. A young girl made her way along the sand, picking up one starfish at a time and tossing it back into the sea. An older gentleman watched this laborious activity for a while before finally saying to the girl, “You’ll never save them all. You can’t make a difference.”
The girl slowed her pace for a moment and then held up the starfish she had in her hand. “I will to this one,” she said before casting it back into the waves.
The starfish story was a great favorite of Ed Brand when he was superintendent of California’s largest high-school district. He liked the story so much, he used to hand out little glass starfish awards at an annual starfish luncheon held at the San Diego Country Club.
The food was excellent. But the story left a sour taste in my mouth. We’re talking about publicly funded education here. But, in the starfish story, only the occasional random individual gets saved. I have step children in the California school system. Brand's vision seemed to offer them some bleak prospects.
And I even heard the same “inspirational story” told by an official of the teachers union at an event held in a fancy hotel in Hollywood.
I was tucking into delicious bacon and eggs when I head that only one starfish in millions can expect a difference. Even when told from the point of view of a labor official speaking to professionals who work every day in California classrooms, the message was presented as a hopeful one: that only a few individuals, selected at random from millions, will get a chance to survive certain destruction on the dry beach of ignorance.
Nobody stood up and heckled. The audience had heard the story so often, most didn’t pause in their private conversations to even listen to the speaker. I hope they weren’t all so jaded they couldn’t imagine a way this corny story could be rewritten so that the students in their care are not to be abandoned in a regrettable but inevitable ecological disaster.
American’s a young country. The state of California is wealthier than most nations. There’s still time for little girl and the old man to get on their cell phones and call somebody who could, I don’t know… bulldoze, or fire hose, all the starfish back into the waves? ...with no starfish left behind?
Wouldn’t a rewrite along those lines be a more practical and ethical use of public funds?
© Michael C. Burgess 2007
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