Six Degrees of Crayons

You can buy a crayon box with 120 colors. I know ’cause I googled it.

There are few people who don’t look around, especially this time of year, and wonder at the display of color Mother Nature presents to us. Beautiful blue skies, deep green leaves, brown soil, white clouds, flowers in every hue. And, when we’re really lucky, we may catch a glimpse of a multicolored rainbow above it all.

Before I go on, let me just talk for a second about something else, completely off topic at this point, but I’ll come back to it in the end, promise.

Back to the crayons. I wonder, off on some tangent as I frequently go these days, what would happen if we put this whole crayon thing in a different context. What if the skin color of all the people of the world were divided evenly among those 120 colors. That’s about 7,500,000,000 (7.5 billion) human beings, 62,500,000 (62.5 million) of whom would have skin the color of each of those crayons.

What would happen then?

Would the blues only want to associate with other blues? Would they break down into tribes of specific hues within the blue family? What about aquas? Are they blues? Greens? Accepted by each? Outcasts to both?

Would yellows welcome their cousins the oranges? What about reds? Too much pigment for the yellows? But maybe accepted by their closer cousins the oranges? Would the oranges have to keep their relationship with the reds a secret from their yellow cousins? Or admit it right out there in the open?

How far would we take it? Will people be painting their houses? Trading in their cars? Buying a new wardrobe? Can a maroon play with a lime at recess? Would an indigo dare to marry a coral?

Oh, and food. Where do you stand on the whole tricolored rotini issue? A feast for the eyes? Or an inappropriate mix of colors?

If, just for one day, humanity were to be a living breathing embodiment of a box of crayons, how would you react?

Would you look around and see the world in terms of us and them?

Or would you look at the bigger picture and see the beauty in all of those spectacular colors?

And maybe, just maybe, in the spirit of six degrees of separation, can we all finally see just how closely related we are?

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