Breaking Out
“Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
In 2008, artist Chris Jordan and photographer Manuel Maqueda heard of an unfortunate effect of plastic pollution in the oceans. Albatrosses were dying in large numbers in Midway Island located in the North Pacific Ocean. Over the next several years, Jordan and his team worked on a documentary film covering this issue. The film ‘Albatross’ is free to watch.
‘Albatross’ has many remarkable moments. Living as they do on this remote island, the birds have never encountered a human being. As a result, they show no fear on being approached by the crew. The viewer gets a chance to observe the daily lives of these birds very closely.
Then there is a close-up shot that shows how the adult albatross inadvertently feeds its chicks pieces of plastic mixed with its food. This process repeated over and over leads to the birds and their chicks dying painful deaths. The footage of dead birds with their bellies full of tiny plastic debris is harrowing.
However, in the midst of all this sorrow, there is a scene that I found very enlightening.
This is a scene where a little chick is trying to hatch out of its egg. The parent stands nearby, looking as anxious as a bird can look, encouraging the little bird to break its eggshell into pieces. It is a long wait for the adult bird. The process can last 48–72 hours.
Watching that scene, I felt a sense of kinship with that albatross parent. It could have easily cracked open the egg with its strong beak, but it didn’t. It was important for the little chick to do this on its own. The little chick’s survival depended on it. So, there was no choice for the adult but to show restraint, even while it squawked uneasily and hung around the half-broken egg.
This reminded me that we adults are only meant to guide our young ones toward the right path. The albatross was forced by instinct to just hover around the egg and not intervene. We humans, on the other hand, do not have any such instinct to hold us back. If we choose, we can completely take over our children’s lives. Regrettably, many of us do make that choice. And our children pay the price.
