There’s No Such Thing…Until There’s A Lot Of It.

As a kid, I loved the book “There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon” by Jack Kent. It was a sweet story of a little boy who wakes up one morning to find a dragon in his house. It’s a small dragon, and fairly innocuous. When the boy tells his mother about it, she simply replies that it’s not really there.

As one would expect, the dragon doesn’t stay small and innocuous for long. It gets bigger, more demanding, and more destructive. The boy’s mother continues to deny its existence, even as it wreaks havoc on the house. As it gets bigger, it stands up, rips the house off its foundations, and runs around the neighbourhood.  Spoiler alert: after much chaos, the mother does, in fact, acknowledge the dragon. She kind of has to. With this validation, the dragon shrinks back to its original, adorable, fun-sized version, and ceases to be such a hot mess. Everyone agrees that it just wanted some attention.

You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?

Humans in general, are good at pretending stuff isn’t there, even as stuff runs rampant over our lives. It’s probably also worth emphasizing that the grown-up character in this book is the one in denial, and the kid in the story is the one trying to call attention to the problem that is ultimately his to deal with. Just sayin’.

There are dragons aplenty among us at the moment, and they’re already huge, but they weren’t always that way. In fact, some of them were quite manageable, once upon a time. Here we are, not putting on our masks or being cautious, because there’s no such thing as a pandemic. We’re not paying attention to climate crises, because there’s no such thing as global warming. We’ve noticed that things are more expensive, and that we don’t have the money to get what we need, but social programs and economic reform that might help with that aren’t real. Hate isn’t real, and it’s fine to shush marginalized people asking for recognition and respect. Our education and health systems are about to rip themselves off their foundations, and go for a disastrous run around the neighborhood, but we manage to turn a blind eye to anything that might help with these things too. This is fine. We’re fine. Everything is fine.

I write and I do philosophy. It’s my job to acknowledge dragons. Notice I didn’t say slay them. There are some beasts that will likely never disappear entirely. I also didn’t say I wasn’t afraid of them. Even the wee “dragons” scare the crap out me. I just can’t get my head around how it’s better to let these dragons balloon out of control, to saddle ourselves with gargantuan problems, when we could pay the smaller ones more attention earlier on and at least keep a lid on their growth. Maybe that’s why I do what I do, making up cryptozoological metaphors and shouting “Hey, there goes your house!” to whomever will listen.

The dragon, the dismayed little kid, the willfully clueless adults, were all the stuff of silly satire in the book when I was little. I laughed and I made my parents read it to me about a million times (hence the state of my childhood copy). Kid’s books are good for a laugh, and they have great replay value. They’re also a useful re-read when we’re bigger. This one seems to be landing differently for me lately.

And so I’m asking, can we, at the very least, stop saying there’s no such thing?