Today, I am thankful for the innocence and candor of our youth.
I’ve always been amazed, and a bit perplexed, by how humans are so starstruck by those in the limelight. We gaze upon the CEOs at major corporations and political leaders of nations, and we marvel and awe at their brilliance. We stare upon the actors in Hollywood and delightfully wish our handprints might also be affixed next to those of Oprah or James Dean on the Walk of Fame. And, finally, we watch with astonishment every move of the Windsor family, including the nonagenarian Queen Elizabeth II and her grandsons’ growing families. Just recently, the news coverage spotlighting that Harry and Meghan would step away from their royal duties as ‘senior members’ of the Windsor royal family to pursue a normal life outstripped real news, like the Australian fires, the SARS-2 coronavirus, and the tensions in Iran.
The absurdity is enough to make one laugh. Yet, I fully comprehend the fascination with the limelight. We spend endless hours reading fairy tales to our children, nephew/nieces, and grandchildren about how the prince marries a peasant girl or the knight rescues the tower-trapped maiden in distress. Today, I’m thankful for those fairy tales that remind us that fame, nobility, and royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
On this day (Apr 2) in 1805, a baby boy was born to a simple, indigent family in Denmark. He attended a local school with other poor students, where he received a basic education. As the story goes, one day his mother decided to take him out in public to see the Danish King Frederick VI, who would be passing by soon with his royal entourage. As the King appeared, the boy yelled out: “He’s nothing more than a human being.” Much to her chagrin, the mom chastised the little Danish boy, screaming: “Have you gone mad, child?’ Well, I guess he had, because soon thereafter, he fled home to become an actor. He realized he was not well suited the role but he had a knack for writing.
So, he got busy writing short stories, focusing first on those fairy tales he’d heard as a child. Of all his great works, the one that resonates most with me tells the tale of a conceited emperor who was vainly interested in his attire. So, he hired two tailors to weave the most elaborate clothes in the land. Being conmen, the two weavers created a suit made of the finest fabric, so amazingly thin that only those who were intelligent and fit for their position could see it. As the weavers explained to the monarch, the items were invisible only to those unfit and ‘hopelessly stupid’. With this in mind, none of the ministers or the townsfolk of the land spoke up when the emperor strode out into public with no clothes on, fearing they would be deemed as unfit for their positions. That is, no one accept for a little child who blurted out: “But, he isn’t wearing anything at all.” Others eventually dropped the charade and joined in, but the emperor continued unfazed until the end of the procession.
Today, I am thankful for little Danish boys like the that childhood storyteller and today’s birthday celebrant, Hans Christian Andersen. I’m also thankful for the modern day Swedish teenagers, like Greta Thunberg, who call out the hypocrisy, inanity, and idiocy in our world. They remind us never to let the limelight fool us.
Sometimes, the emperor is really not wearing any clothes. Thanks, Hans, for the reminder.
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