Desperate Remedies

“Here?”

“Not quite. That side’s a bit wonky now.”

“Do I go up? Down?” The art teacher squeezed the question around the roll of tape between her lips.

“Like, a little bit of both ’til you get to the middle.” Her back was facing me, but I still thought wagging my finger would help. I was purposely being vague, but not to give her a hard time. I was just enjoying this frolic around the limitations of verbal communication. 

“What?” Ms. Falls’ voice and arms were noticeably shaking. 

She was losing patience and strength, and she was standing on a ladder. A short step ladder, yes. But any ladder can turn this simple task into a workplace hazard. And I didn’t want any responsibility put on me if our elementary school lost its art teacher to a fractured skull or shattered spine. Think of the others, Yasmine would say, which I had figured out translates to, Your personal problems get in the way of other people’s more important issues.

“Right there. Perfect,” and a gentle golf clap for her effort. 

The art teacher stepped down from her ladder and backed up to view the banner in its entirety. The long strip of paper, overcrowded with multicolored block letters and summer flowers, spanned a small area of the wall in the gymnasium. It dipped slightly in the middle and then ended noticeably low on the right side. 

“Ugh,” Ms. Falls stomped back to the wall and gathered her skirt to climb the step ladder again. 

“It’s fine, really.” Her boots clomped up the metal steps, and I interpreted her silence as an acceptance of my coded apology. 

“’Climate Solutions: Now It’s Our Turn.’” From behind me I heard Yasmine reading the banner’s slogan like she was deliberating over each word and punctuation. And when I looked over and saw her cross-armed in the gym’s doorway, I could tell everything she saw offended her.

“‘It’s our turn?’ Is that what that says?” She appeared next to me, her neck strained forward like it too needed to decipher the slogan. 

“Yeah. Pretty ridiculous. ‘Our turn?’” I have my reservations. I always have reservations.

“No, I mean, is that what it says?” She was squinting, intensely, trying to parse the blue, red, green, and orange letters from the orange, green, red, and blue flowers. “I can’t, it’s hard to read. The letters are all – ” She stopped herself when she noticed the art teacher-slash-banner designer hiding in plain sight, her straight back staring at us and her hands listless by her hips. 

“The slogan, color scheme, and design were all presented by the Summer Project Exhibition Planning Committee and agreed upon by the faculty members.” Her voice, flat as a knife, bounced off the wall’s wood panelling and came right back at us, as loud and clear as if she were standing at the tips of our noses. “If you have any reservations about anything you see here, you should have spoken up at the meeting.”

Yasmine and I looked at each other in that way buddy-film characters do when they know they’re in trouble: wide eyes, arched brows, panicked lips mouthing silent words. 

“No, I meant, I mean, my contacts are dried out, I can’t see anything. It’s all just a, just a colorful blur to me. It’s actually quite beautiful, Ms. Falls.” 

“Thank you, Ms. Parcel.” Ms. Falls picked up the step ladder and exited the gym. The banner was now only the slightest bit crooked. Yasmine finally released what she thought was to be her last breath. 

“It’s infinitely better than Samantha’s slogan idea,” I wave my hand over the banner that was to never be, “Desperate remedies for a desperate period.” 

“But look at this.” Yasmine’s voice was hushed in case Ms. Falls was still in earshot. “It’s like those Magic Eye posters you have to stare through to see.”

“Frankly, I’d rather people didn’t decipher that mess. What’s that supposed to mean anyway? ‘It’s our turn now?’ Like, ‘The adults didn’t do squat about the planet, so I guess our summer project is to save the world!’”

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now. The projects are all laid out, the banner’s up, and now we get the unenviable task of choosing the best ones.” 

“Ugh. I need a desperate remedy from this event.”

“Well, I convinced some of the teachers to help us out and nominate their grade’s choice pieces for us. If we see no problem with them, then we just pick the best one from them.”

“Way to look out for your buddy, Yasmine!” I’m the only teacher allowed to call her that.

“They’re on that table there on the other side of the gym.” Yasmine used her ever-present clipboard to show the way. 

“Should I just take a peek and see if any got picked over?”

“Do you really want to?”

A rhetorical question. I most certainly did not. Nonetheless, I still made a quick flyby over the other tables to survey the hodgepodge collections of lumpy clay figurines, ragged robots, and travel journals of theme parks or the beach. 

“Didn’t these kids know there’s supposed to be a theme to all of this?” I picked up a crinkled piece of rough drawing paper from the Grade 5 table. “Like, this is just a drawing of two cows in the grass.”

“Maybe they think there’s an environmental significance to the cows. What does their explanation say?” 

“It says, ‘I drewed 2 cow.’” A sigh escaped me as my arm deflated and dropped the drawing back on the table.

Yasmine stood next to a single table with almost a dozen projects from students of all grades that ranged in execution from patiently crafted dioramas to stunning watercolor landscapes and busy research posters. All of them had the lingering stink of parental influence on them. 

The only project that looked legitimately done by a child was a drawing of a polygonal house with thick walls of black crayon. A crude toilet took up the interior of the house, and outside there was a kitchen garden composed of multidirectional green squiggles. A rectangle, possibly a tube, connected the two. It was titled – 

“Doo-Doo to Dirt!” I read the title with more pride than the kid’s own parents. Yasmine was smiling for the first time since she’d returned from vacation. 

“I knew you’d go straight to that one.”

“This kid – Whose is this? Hingto! Of course! Hingto’s got a point. All we can do now is eat our doo-doo ’til we die.”

“I don’t think that’s the message he was going for.” 

“Still. Desperate remedies. Give this kid the prize money.”

“There’s no prize money.” 

“What’re we choosing then? Who gets the biggest participation ribbon?”

“We’re choosing works to represent each grade and then one work to represent the student body. Those works will then be on display at the city’s exhibition of projects from all the schools in the city.”

“Oh.” Deflated again. “Well, my choice for everything is Doo-Doo to Dirt.”

“Second of all, I did a lot, curating all of this for you. The least you can do is consider even the possibility of choosing another project.” 

“Yasmine, Doo-Doo to Dirt is my Football in the Groin, okay? I don’t need to see any of the other projects. This wins every time.” She stepped away from the table and stood patiently as if she were a maitre d’ willing to wait forever for me to choose a wine for dinner. 

I perused the other works, or at least gave the impression that I was perusing the other works. I bent down from the waist. I rested my finger on my chin, tapping it eagerly as I leaned closer. Even when I was walking between projects I muttered, Mm-hm. Mm-hm. 

Yasmine pointed with her chin at a shoebox diorama depicting a scene from the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Made by a 2nd grader, it housed a cityscape made of gray and black LEGOs poking out of a thick layer of snow-white Play-Doh. There was something tall and green sticking out with a yellow piece on top. 

“Ah, that’s supposed to be the Statue of Liberty? Interesting. Bold.” 

Yasmine then indicated again with her clipboard to a thick sketchbook filled cover-to-cover with dusty sketches done in frantic strokes of charcoal. Each page was a different ecosystem reduced to a desolate wasteland. In each drawing, among the emptiness and ruin, there was a solitary animal, a different animal for each scene. The animals were tiny, just a few marks on the paper. The student wrote that each solitary animal represents the last member of its species before going completely extinct. 

I looked up and saw Yasmine nodding at me with knowing eyes. I nodded back in agreement. 

“Doo-doo to Dirt for the win.” 

“Come on!”

“What?”

“Even one of those sketches in that book speaks volumes more than Doo-Doo to Dirt.” 

“Yeah, I agree! It’s a very powerful message. Most of these point very big fingers at the very big problem, but they are no simpatico with the theme of the assignment, which is,” I looked for the banner across the gym but it had since fallen to the floor, “Uh, ’Ya’ll flubbed it, now we gotta fix it.’ Doo-Doo to Dirt is a solution. A remedy. A desperate remedy, if you will, with a message. ’We gotta eat our own doo-doo now. Thanks for nothing. Shame on you.’” 

Yasmine knew I was right. 

“You know I’m right.”

“Okay, true. They gotta have solutions. Then I’d like to talk about Sara’s solution.” 

“Sara’s is in here?” Sara was the summer project all-star. For six years straight she’s been wowing students and teachers alike with projects like a replica of a Babylonian water well, fully functional, made from chopsticks. Or, her best so far, a documentary about struggling fisheries that exposed shady business dealings and lead to the arrest of a top executive and two government officials along with a slew of formal resignations. You don’t miss a Sara project. 

“It’s on the wall up there.”

“A poster. Hm.” Poster is a daring choice because once you hang them up they’re just out there demanding everyone’s attention. And depending on the quality of your content, you’ve got either a billboard dedicated to your greatness or you’ve just erected your own gallows. 

I whistled at the sight of the beast. Sara’s poster was large, easily two square meters, and pink. All the information and data, of which there were copious amounts, from explanatory paragraphs to pie charts, even portraits of the people she interviewed, were done by hand, written in the straightest handwriting with the finest felt pen.

“Check out this penmanship!” I whistled again because it was all I could do from laying my quivering body on this masterpiece of visual presentation. “Those felt pens don’t let you get away with even the slightest bump. You gotta be steady as stone through and through. And look! I don’t think she wrote it in pencil first. I think she just raw-dogged it with the pen! This is magnanimous.” 

“It’s definitely an impressive sight.” Yasmine was holding something back.

“I haven’t even read anything yet. I can’t get past seeing it as just shapes and lines.”

“I think you should read it. Especially her solution.” 

“What? Oh, God. Where does it begin?” 

Start at the title. That’s what I tell my students any time they’re met with a new text. Start at the title. Look at the illustrations or pictures. Read the first few sentences to get a grasp of the tone. 

An Uncomfortable Truth. A bit of a bite from that one environmental documentary, but, come on, she’s 12 years old. We can let that slide. 

The hand-drawn portraits are of an elderly woman, Mrs. Rena Thomas, 86 years old, and a Dr. Eustace Feldman, Professor of Environmental Studies and Head Researcher at Tidwell University. Okay. Old people. 

Pie chart: Can’t be bothered with that now.

First sentences: No sensible human being with even a modicum of intelligence can deny that the origins of today’s climate catastrophe, its propagation and acceleration, is solely, unequivocally, the work of human beings. It started with “us” and it must end with “us.” For decades now we have pointed the finger at industrial corporations and demanded they [What fine italics!] be the ones to clean up their mess. But, alas, they have proven not only unwilling to clean up after themselves, but, unfortunately, unable to do so too. We can no longer look to the instigators of this catastrophe to be our saviors. The problem we face now has reached a magnitude so extreme that our solution must also be equally extreme. 

“Trent, are you okay?”

“What?”

“You’re breathing kinda heavy. Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just, uh, this is really intense. I mean she just comes out the gate swinging! I like it, though. Extreme solutions! Desperate remedies!” 

"Keep reading. I wanna know your thoughts on her solution.” 

“Is it desperate?”

 “Just keep reading.”

“Scientific research now tells us that expecting to fix the climate crisis by undoing what’s been done is as futile as trying to rebuild a razed home with only its ashes. We must think of a way not to undo, but a way to redo. Currently, energy consumption and waste disposal are the two leading factors suffocating the environment. And it’s not private corporations consuming all of that energy and throwing away all of that waste. It’s humans, the general population. These are byproducts of us. It is no coincidence that the escalation of environmental degradation continues hand-in-hand with the exploding global population. The solution, therefore, is logical: in order to reduce these byproducts of our own increasing presence on this planet, we are obligated to reduce our own presence on this planet.”

I took a step away from the poster and then looked over at Yasmine, her expecting eyes fixed on me.

“This is genius.”

“What?” 

“Sheer genius.” 

“Trent, do you understand what she proposes here?”

“Yeah. Humans are causing the destruction of the planet with their consumption and waste. More humans, more consumption and waste. But, less humans, less consumption and waste, less environmental destruction. It’s flawless logic.” 

“She’s proposing genocide as a solution to climate change! Look. See this drawing of the old woman? 

“Yeah. That’s Mrs. Rena Thomas. She’s 86 years old.” 

“Sara wants to kill her!”

“What? No. Why? What’d she do?”

“Here, in her poster.” She was knocking the poster with the corner of the clipboard. “‘Methods.’ She talks about first euthanizing the elderly since they are, quote, ‘the largest demographic in several countries that consumes the most energy and produces the most waste while contributing disproportionately less to local and global economies.’” 

Suddenly the purpose of the pie chart became clear.

“But why the picture of Mrs. Thomas?”

“Actually, Mrs. Thomas thinks the idea is pretty practical. But that’s beside the point! She’s probably senile anyway.”

“So, Sara’s plan has environmental and economic viability. It’s a legitimate solution.”

“It’s a legitimate supervillain plot! And after that, it’s the homeless and the terminally unemployed! The disabled, Trent! Are you reading this?” She used her clipboard again to indicate her frustration with violent strikes across my shoulders and back. “Are you okay with this desperate remedy, Trent?”

“It’s for a desperate period!” I managed to step away from her and then stood squinting at the poster, hoping I looked like I was reading intently and not trying to keep in the tears from those smart smacks of her clipboard. I tried to fake a sneeze but then suddenly changed it to a yawn to show that I was sleepy and needed to rub my eyes. My knuckles were glistening wet when I was done. Yasmine passed a pack of tissues to me. 

“I’m sorry I hit you. I’m just not okay with this. The elderly, the disabled. People, Trent! These people are in our students’ families. And she says they’re in the way. It’s too cold for a 12-year-old.”

“Look, we can’t be emotional about this. Supervillain vibes aside, we have to give her credit for her effort. Think about it objectively. She identified a problem and articulated an original, comprehensive solution, supported by oodles of research and data. She ticked all the boxes. She ticked all the boxes, made up some new boxes, and then ticked those. We can’t just ignore this towering achievement just because it makes us uncomfortable.”

“So, what? We just say, ‘Look, we don’t agree with your idea, but we applaud your effort?’ Like some kind of disclaimer?”

“Can’t we? We’re teachers. We gotta stand by our students and encourage them in their educational pursuits.” 

“Even if we choose this poster, the city won’t show it in public.” 

“Let the city deal with that. At least we can show that we stand by our students.”

“Fine. Let’s just finish this. I wanna go home.” 

“Yeah, me too. I know I tried to pretend I was yawning and sleepy – ”

“Because you were really about to cry?”

“ – But I am actually tired.” 

“So, we’ll choose Sara’s Uncomfortable Truth to represent Grade 6. Do we just go all in with that teacher-of-the-year gusto and choose her as the top project of the school?” 

“Whoa whoa whoa! Let’s not be hasty. Sara’s research is very thorough and organized. But … ”

“Don’t say Doo–” 

“ – Doo-Doo to Dirt is an equally legit, practical solution, one that our school should be proud to stand next to. Like a flag!”

“We need to make a decision. Flip a coin?” Yasmine tapped her fingernails against the clipboard.

“Sara’s Uncomfortable Truth has scholastic wizardry, but Hingto’s Doo-Doo to Dirt turns doo-doo to dirt.”

Yasmine’s chin dropped to her chest. I picked up Hingto’s diagram and held it next to Sara’s poster.

“Let’s go over these one more time.”