Let’s face it, the unemployment rate is heading upward, banks are failing, the outgoing U.S. administration is hell-bent on slashing every environmental protection law it can find as it rides out of town, and the stock market average is reenacting its own version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. It’s enough to make anyone feel depressed, disenfranchised, and down-right despondent. While hope is coming in the form of the incoming Obama administration, there is still a deep-seated desire in all our hearts to feel that we are, in some way, participating in making things better, even if only a little. This in itself might just be one of the reasons that my discovery of We Add Up through their exhibit at the National Science Teachers Association Area Conference in Portland, Oregon left such an impression on me.
Rather than try to summarize what We Add Up is all about, I will let their own words speak for themselves:
WE ADD UP is a global campaign using organic cotton t-shirts that literally “counts you in” in the fight against global warming. Every shirt is printed by hand with a unique number. YOUR number represents your place in the sequential global count of all the people who are taking steps to help stop climate change. As the count grows, we demonstrate to the world that “WE ADD UP.”
To those who might say “So, you buy a t-shirt and it has a number…big deal” I would counter with the observation that it is, indeed, a big deal. It is an act of positive affirmation of our own desire to make things better, to carry the message of our own particular actions in the larger cause on our very backs, and to state boldly to the world that we are not alone and we know it.
As I spent a few minutes discussing what We Add Up was all about with their representative at the NSTA, I was still awash in the news reported that morning of the bald-faced hubris and money-drunk arrogance of the heads of the “big three” U.S. auto manufacturers sitting on Capitol Hill attempting to commit economic blackmail against the U.S. taxpayers. This mixed with the motto of We Add Up, “No one can do Everything / Everyone can do Something” and dredged up one of my favorite scenes from the Pixar movie A Bug’s Life in which the villainous thug Hopper (a grasshopper who lived off the toil of a colony of bullied ants) proclaims, “You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life!”
Tangential, I know. However the fact stands clear that it gave me great joy to discover an organization taking an action we can all undertake and making it into the opportunity to make a greater statement to the world around us. Perhaps as a result, we will realize that we do outnumber the “grasshoppers” by far more than a hundred to one and collectively stand up for a better future.
Peace and good bird watching.
