Checking It Out Twice [FICTOID]

The class challenge was to list three things that should be extinct.

He wrote three things on his list:  Racism, the Sony Walkman, and a dinosaur.

His teacher frowned.  “You failed to do the assignment,” she said.  “For instance, dinosaurs.  They’re already extinct.”

“Except they’re not,” said the boy.  “They evolved into birds.”

“Not the same thing,” said his teacher.

“I say they are and it’s my list.”

“So you want birds to go extinct?”

“No, you’re not reading it close enough.  I wrote ‘a dinosaur,’ in particular the woodpecker that wakes me up every morning by rapping on a tree limb outside my window.  That great-great-great-grandson of a tyrannosaur needs to go extinct ASAP.”

“All right,” the teacher frowned, “but the Sony Walkman?  They haven’t made those in decades.”

“All the more reason to make them go extinct.”

“But they’re not being made -- “

“What they represent still exists:  people shutting themselves off from the outside world and other people.”

“They did that long before Walkmen – “

“Walkmans,” said the boy,  “It’s a proper noun, so it ends with an ‘s’ not in ‘-men’.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“As sure as I’m standing here.  You’re the teacher, you should know that.”

“Harrumph!  Even so, transistor radios with earplugs long predated the Sony Walkman.”

“Not the same thing.  Transistor radios tuned into local radio stations.  Radio stations were a shared community experience.  Everybody listening to a specific station heard the same thing at the same time.  Furthermore, radio stations reported on local news and events.  They built community, they didn’t destroy it.”

“Well, finally racism.  People will always be racist.”

“Racism is a modern system.  I won’t deny people in the past didn’t exhibit bias and prejudice and chauvinism, but racism is an established cultural practice deliberately designed to prop one group over and above other groups specifically by denying those other groups opportunities the favored group enjoys.

“It is intrinsically unfair and unjust and we can take steps as rational human beings to undo it.”

“You are a cockeyed optimist,” said the teacher.

“My sexual orientation has nothing to do with it,” said the boy.  “As long as thoughtful people exist, hope and optimism will never go extinct.”

© Buzz Dixon