Truer words have never been spoken these days, the bad news is out there and in the air we breathe. We have wars, school shootings, inflation, political disaster and the looming threat of recession. The old saying, “you can run but you can’t hide”, has been replaced by “now you can’t even run”.
It’s in the news on TV, it’s on the radio, it’s in the newspapers and magazines, it’s all good… with bad news. It negatively affects everyone from young children to great-great-grandparents. It’s time to take all that bad news piling up so high and bury it deep.
Imagine if you can, coming home after working all day, finishing your evening meal and looking for the newspaper in an effort to get away from it all. You smooth out the paper and the headline on the first page reads, “Two preschoolers play a prank on the teacher.” No bad news here, as you start reading.
Max and Jax, two 4-year-old besties, were in the same preschool class. The two pint-sized buddies have hatched a plan to trick their teacher. They decided to each shave their heads into identical mohawk haircuts. In doing so, there was no way for the teacher to tell them apart. The two little “grasshoppers” giggled for the rest of this class, knowing what they were going to do.
With the help of each of their parents, they both went to the same barber and signed identical mohawk haircuts. The next day before school, they wrote name tags and swapped with each other so that they each had the other’s name on their shirts. They went to class and sat on each other’s desks. To one young person, there was simply no way for the teacher to tell them apart.
The teacher (pre-informed by the parents) played with the prank in every way, as Max and Jax looked at each other laughing the whole time. Towards the end of the hour, the two little “fireballs” came clear and confessed that they had usurped their teacher and she had no idea. The teacher was totally shocked to learn that the youngsters had given her such perfect camouflage work. Boys will be boys, they say.
The front page of the diary shows a photo of the two boys with identical haircuts. It was obvious that Max was probably 6 inches taller than Jax, but the youngsters didn’t see that as a gift. The heartwarming part of the story was clear to see. The newspaper never mentioned a word about Max being white and Jax being black. These little boys were color blind and oblivious to the fact that the color of their skin should have been a recognizable difference between the two of them. They haven’t seen it.
Perhaps there will come a day when stories like Max and Jax will be the headliners and front-page news of the day. This is the kind of news that sells.
JD Francis is a Waverly businessman and developer who also writes two feature sets, “Teacher Feature” and “With This Ring”. He can be contacted at [email protected]
