My older son clutched a pinkish, sparkly rock in his hand when I picked him up from school this week.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s my magic rock,” he explained. “We didn’t clean up our room and Daddy said he was gonna come and give us a spanking. I held the rock and wished that we wouldn’t give us a spanking and when he came up to our room all he did was tell us where to place things and no to put anything on the shelf. He didn’t spank us! The rock worked.”
I smiled and looked down at the rock as we walked toward my car.
“You know, there is magic but its not inside the rock. The magic is within you,” I told him. “You can use the rock as a focal point, a physical thing to focus all of your magic energy. But…with or without the rock, you still have the same powers. YOU are the magic.”
He smiled at me. “Mommy, can we take this rock and go buy something?”
“No. In this society, we don’t value rocks. We value gold.”
“But gold is just a rock.”
“I know, but as a collective society, we all decided to believe that the gold rock has value. We all have to agree on something for it to be true, well, in this society we do.”
“What if we called Obama and asked him to tell everyone that this kind of rock has value?”
“We could do that, but then all the countries in the world would have to agree too because we all use the same material- gold- as a point of value to trade.”
He looked at his rock and placed it into his bookbag.
“The whole society has to agree?” he asked.
“Yeah, I explained that to you before. It’s called social constructionism. Without it, it would be as thought everyone spoke a different language and no one would understand each other.”
I love teaching my boys about how ideas and BELIEF are really what make the world go round. I wonder how this will affect them as PEOPLE…
Guess we’ll have to wait and see…