After participating in our first and last public Easter Egg hunt I have a few observations. Just to warn you this is going to make me sound like a pretentious socialist dad who would look down his nose at pretty much every parent that will never lay eyes on this blog entry.
I found myself on the front line of the first hole at a golf course where a couple of thin ribbons stood between a couple hundred kids aged 3-6... and a fairway of colorful plastic eggs about 50 yards away. A couple of sandwich boards indicated the "rules" of the hunt:
No running
Parents can help but are not to touch the eggs
No pushing
One golden egg per child
In addition to these rules, an employee with a megaphone communicated (or tried to communicate) that due to the large turnout of tots, there is a 3 egg limit per child.
Right.
You can probably imagine how this turned out. Needless to say, the rules were broken and there was much crying.
My daughter, despite obeying all of the rules and only coming up with a single empty egg that a random mother was shamed into dropping, stayed surprisingly calm. She handled the whole situation like a champ. Not bad for a 3 year old.
I'm not sure how this chaos could have been prevented. I'm not sure why there were kids with baskets and bags full of eggs unwilling to share after noticing the crying kids around them. I'm not sure why a dad I overheard tell his son not to cry if he doesn't get any eggs. I suspect the emotional damage that has been done to this poor boy has left him more desperately needing to cry than anyone else. (But that's another blog post.)
As I carried my daughter away in her pastel blue and yellow Easter dress, I felt like this is a perfect model of capitalism... and why pure capitalism doesn't work.
First, the kids who worked the hardest (ie. ran the fastest) ended up with the greatest number of eggs. (Let's call this group the 1 percenters) Those who followed the rules, least willing or unable to work (run) ended up with nothing. (Egg poverty) The greatest percentage of kids in between ended up with a handful of eggs. (The middle class) Not surprisingly, the 1 percenters were the ones least willing to share their abundance of eggs. Why should they. They 'earned' their eggs, right? If they want to gorge themselves on chocolate and candy it's their choice. I watched my daughter's friend give her one of his 3 eggs.
Just imagine if the one percenters gave up a third of their eggs to those who were just a little bit too slow in joining the fray. There would be a lot fewer criers.
This blunt metaphor brings up a lot of questions that my wife and I discussed on our drive home tonight.
Why are some people more willing to share than others? Why is it easier to share with those of your own community or family structure? Is it human nature to be kind or is there some philosophical ulterior motive to acts of kindness that only benefit yourself.
And why the hell are so many bratty kids unsupervised by ass-parents who probably don't live by societal and moral rules themselves!
***Update***
Case in point:
THIS! A short article about an attempted world record egg hunt in Sacramento. This reeks of the holiday "spirit" that is now common around the Thanksgiving weekend.
