But What If

The subject of candy is the most surefire thing to spur my children’s imaginations. During a game of Candy Land or while watching Willy Wonka, we inevitably find ourselves in a flurry of rapid-fire imaginative queries. “Mom! What if we could ride on a chocolate river to school? What if the WHOLE sky- like, the whole thing and all the clouds- was made of cotton candy?!”

What if?

I can never really fully decide whether they expect an actual answer. The earnest look in their eyes suggests that they want me to engage; I sometimes do. As with all hypotheticals, there’s really no one answer, so I sometimes go magically off the rails in my response. Sometimes, I try to offer something realistic or helpful - a hidden lesson about the real world through the lens of an unknown one. Ultimately, though: if you are going to ask a silly question, you should expect some kind of silly answer. If you ate gumdrops for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you very obviously should expect a line out your front door of hungry dinosaurs.

This whole diaper project thing is saturated with such questions. I was speaking with someone the other day about our big plan to place dispensers around Brooklyn.

"But… what if one person takes more than they should?”

“What if someone just….. TAKES them?"

All of us see SOME kind of problem with the questions above. Some might see the problem if either of those scenarios were to play out. I see a problem with the very nature of the questions themselves- not with the imaginary scenario. Would you ask this question if it were about toilet paper? Water? What does it say that we, as a city, are worried about the idea that someone, or many people, might take something useful to them… and use it? The questions we ask tell us a lot about our underlying beliefs about how things should be. Do we, as a city, WANT diapers to be a commodity in society to be guarded, protected, made available in small quantities, like a Golden Ticket?

Really, though: what does it even mean to reference someone’s “fair share” of diapers? What about the situation is “fair” if yours is 10 diapers to get you through the next month and you have no other options on the table?

What if we lived in a world made entirely of Legos? … maybe everyone would get the diapers they needed.

Change starts with committing to asking new questions. Like this one: “what does it say about the state of families in NYC if people DO take as many diapers as they need?” Or: “If diapers are a commodity profitable and lucrative enough to resell: what then? Shall we then crusade to lock down the diapers, administered in approved quantities predetermined by the Philanthropic Machine, or should we be committed to facing the problem and getting rid of the issue at its core? Can we ready ourselves to see what happens when we DO make diapers readily available, and are we committed to shining a light on whatever we learn?”