Web of Strife

Where I work we have an educational game for kids. It's called the Web of Life game. All the kids get in a circle and are assigned a "role" in nature. You could be a tree, animal, air, water, human...take your pick. A string is randomly strung so that all the kids are linked together. The game starts by one kid pulling a string to find out who it connects to. They then have to tell how their role is linked to that other role. Eventually the game will come back to the original string puller to show that everyone is, in fact linked together and dependent on one another.

How nice it would be if we had this game for adults. Take for instance, the GP oil spill and the idea that somehow boycotting the company will make a point. The only point it will make is how nobody is separate from this spill. The folks who are boycotting it seem to think that they exist outside of the web. What they need to know is that there is an intricate web of relationships that will lead back to them and smack them hard on the ass! For instance, boycotting a local gas station puts a financial strain on the owner who will then may end up selling the business. Perhaps the next gas company coming in will charge more for gas. (And yet they will still be just as environmentally apathetic as BP.) So you end up paying more. That's a small connection. How about the fact that if lots of other people do this same BP boycott. Suddenly BP loses the finances to help clean up, and support those effected by the spill. What might be those ramifications for you? Think on it for a while and you might start to understand.

What it comes down to is the "pay it forward" way of thinking. If you send something negative through the web, then something negative will come back to you. If you send something positive...well, it ain't rocket science people! Call it karma, or say "you reap what you sew". Either way you are in the same web as me and BP.