Loraxes and Yooks

For a week after Conservation Lobby Day, I carried a little pink scrap of paper around in my pocket.

Representative Cory Mason (D-Racine) had given a passionate talk about the importance of what we were doing—meeting with our senators and representatives to urge them to support conservation measures. Mason ended the speech by asking us to rip off a scrap from our Lobby Day schedules and write one word on it: UNLESS. The word gave me a delicious chill as I wrote it.

He was referencing Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, the classic children’s book on conservation.

In the story, the regretful old Once-ler tells a young boy about the way he once cut down all the beautiful Truffula Trees for the benefit of his business. A funny little creature called the Lorax appeared—“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees”—but the Lorax could not persuade the Once-ler to stop. The Once-ler laments to the boy:

…And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word…
“UNLESS.”
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn’t guess.

“But now,” says the Once-ler,
“Now that you’re here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”

So I carried my “UNLESS” around in my pocket, the same way many of us carry the word around unconsciously, seeing ourselves as Loraxes in the real world, speaking up for the trees and the earth and all those who can’t speak for themselves. It’s inspiring to think of ourselves that way.

Ron didn’t remember the “UNLESS” part of The Lorax, so when we returned home after Conservation Lobby Day, we looked the poem up online and read it together. Enjoying myself, I then jumped to another dark, powerful Dr. Seuss poem, The Butter Battle.

The theme is the Cold War, and the format is similar: the narrator is a small boy, with an old man telling him a story. 

We watch as Grandfather builds bigger and bigger weapons with which to wipe out the Zooks across the Wall. Each time, the Zooks come up with an identical weapon, and it’s a chillingly familiar standoff.

Then my grandfather said,
“It’s high time that you knew
of the terribly horrible thing that Zooks do.
In every Zook house and in every Zook town
every Zook eats his bread
with the butter side down!”
“But we Yooks, as you know,
when we breakfast or sup,
spread our bread,” Grandpa said,
“with the butter side up.
That’s the right, honest way!”
Grandpa gritted his teeth.
“So you can’t trust a Zook who spreads bread underneath!”

After reading both poems, Ron and I retired from Dr. Seuss, satiated on ominous warnings from cleverly rhyming old men. I thought nothing more of either book until our last conversation with our Republican friend Scott about the environment.

At the time we spoke with him, I still had my UNLESS in my pocket.

As always, speaking with Scott forced me to examine my assumptions. Am I really a Lorax, facing a phalanx of unyielding businessmen who seek profit at the cost of the environment? Sometimes it feels impossible not to see things that way.

And yet, Scott cares about the environment, disagreeing mainly with the ways Ron and I want to protect it. I began to wonder: Is it possible that the Lorax’s failure to protect the trees is his own fault?

Maybe the funny little creature shouldn’t spend so much time shouting from tree stumps. That’s a terrible way to get someone to listen to you. Maybe he should instead ask the Once-ler to sit down at a table and talk about what’s important to him. Might there be a way for business to thrive, for example, while preserving some of the Truffula Trees?

Or maybe the metaphor doesn’t work and we need to just admit that all conservatives aren’t Once-lers.

In fact, The Butter Battle might often be a better analogy. The more I get to know Scott and Carol, the more I think of conservatives as Zooks: people a lot like us, who just do things a little differently.

And that makes us not noble Loraxes—but Yooks! People who judge and label the Other, battling them without bothering to get to know them.

It’s easy to vilify conservatives, but maybe they’re more like us than we care to admit.

There’s more to it, of course. Scott and Carol don’t butter their bread differently from Ron and me; they believe different things, trusting different groups and strategies for getting things done. But still, in real life, we all have to do better than the Lorax and better than the Yooks.

We’re grown-ups, after all. We need to learn how to talk to those on the other side—UNLESS we do, no one will listen.