December - they're replaying all those ageless Christmas classic specials on TV again. Tonight, it was 1964's "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," the longest-running, highest-rated holiday special in TV history. It included one of the most poignant scenes among the shows I watched as a kid - the visit to the Island of Misfit Toys. Here lived Charlie-in-the-Box, a bird that swam rather than flew (and wasn't a penguin), a train with square wheels, a cowboy on an ostrich, and other unwanted, defective toys. The whole segment always made me inexplicably sad whenever I saw it. Inexplicable, because the story ended on a happy note, with Rudolph guiding Santa's sled to this island to pick up all the toys and dropping them off to children. (Interestingly, this ending wasn't in the original version, but was added in response to a write-in campaign from shocked audience members).
Yet perhaps not so inexplicable. While this show didn't change over the decades, I certainly have, and while I quickly outgrew watching such shows, I also gradually came to see that the island is all too real. No, not some place in the Arctic with toys. I've visited this island in the schoolyard, in the postures and faces of classmates who didn't fit into any clique. I've seen it in the eyes of healthy, caged dogs whenever I've gone to the local animal shelter. I really experienced the full tour when I played with energetic, physically-impaired children in a home-based orphanage in China two years ago.
What is it about people, myself most of all, that they so consistently want to discriminate, exclude, quarantine, ignore, and judge others? Excuses like the need for order and self-protection are simply groundless when applied to individuals whose only crime is that they're different from us. So, during the holidays, a time when the lonely and rejected feel the lowest and most suicidal, I ask again, what is it, and what will you or I do about it? I believe the answer lies closer to the Island of Misfit Toys than I-Land, where most of us live and hate to leave.
"A toy is never truly happy until it is loved by a child." - King Moonracer
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