fandomhigh | Practical Philosophy, Thursday

"Welcome back, class," Ender said, sitting down on the lawn with his legs crossed beneath him. "You may all have noticed some small changes in the world around you this week."

A pause.

"Or perhaps you haven't. After all, upheaval has come to the island in such enormously dramatic ways these past weeks that the lack of fish might almost seem like nothing at all." A pause. "Until you take a step off the causeway and look at the restaurants page in Yelp."

Look, you did adventure your way, Ben and Ender did it theirs.

"Still, small changes can steamroll into big implications. How did life evolve on this planet? How does the ecosystem function? How did cultures develop differently? Many societies were created in places where the fishing was bountiful - those settlements likely don't exist."

He looked at the class.

"Looking back at your life, can you identify any small changes that wound up having bigger implications than you expected?" he said. "Or is there anything you can think of that, if changed, would warp the world or your life in ways others might not predict?"

Beat.

"Or rant about the lack of sushi. This is a safe space."

He and Ben had had arguments this week.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Fishily.

Norman Babcock

Okuyasu Nijimura

Wayne

Nina

Shuri

Lana Beniko

Grab your non-fishy sandwich and a bottle of water, or just sit around.

About fish. Or change. Or both.

"This class always hurts my head," Okuyasu lamented, trying to think on this. "I mean, little differences? My life has been lots of big things. I can't think of something little that could change, unless we're talking about Koichi!"

He laughed a guffaw and then realized no one else was going to laugh at that.

"...he's a short kid from back home."

"What about, like, if your world suddenly had no rice?????????" Nina suggested. "That's, like, a little thing that'd change a lot of things!!!!!!!!!!!"

"...it means we'd eat more sandwiches?" Okuyasu said, because the socio-economic repercussions of a Japan where rice didn't exist was far beyond his ability to imagine.

"Even a slight improvement is an improvement," Shuri said with a little smile. "My brother always complains that I cannot leave something alone when it works just fine. But 'just fine' isn't as good as it could. He has a...uniform...that he wears for protection and I upgraded it even though the one he had was just fine. And the new one is much better, plus I got hilarious footage of him shooting across the room when the kinetic energy it was storing up discharged." Shuri's smile got much wider. "Would you like to see it?"

"I sometimes wonder what it would be like now, if the Jedi hadn't hunted the Sith to near extinction and we'd grown up with Empire and Republic as they are now," Lana said. "But apart from an interesting exercise, there's not much point in it."

History wasn't going to just change, after all.

Probably.

He misses sushi.

"So I experimented," Ben said, coming in with a bag, "and the tuna fish, salmon, and shrimp salad sandwiches turned into...bread...when I came across the causeway. So do you want grilled cheese or just to be sad about sushi?"