Boogers on the Wall

My 7-year-old son is convinced that if he can get people to stop smoking, he can end global warming.

He and his friend were outside this week passing out hand-made fliers.

They were hackling and picketing in front of my house while I did the dishes after dinner. When I went to see what they were shouting about, they ran up to me excited that they were going to get everyone to stop smoking.

“I just feel so good inside mom,” my son said.

Terrified that they were going to offend some of my cigarette-smoking neighbors by hand delivering fliers to their doors, I tried to steer them away from telling people what to do and push them into a post-the-flier-on-our-front-door direction. I told them I didn’t want them to hurt people’s feelings.

They thought about what I said, but decided to continue with a slightly altered message. They weren’t going to force people to stop smoking they would ask people nicely to stop smoking.

“Here, I’ll write ‘please’” at the top,” my son added.

And that’s just what he did. He added “please,” above the message that read: stop smoking, globel warming, naturl gas, invirement needs help. Ice burg melting. Kids that hav asmu can’t breeth http://www.stopsmokingtoday.org.

But in the end the kids weren’t really singling out cigarette smokers like I feared.

I asked them specifically what type of smoke they were talking about and they said every type of smoke – fires, cars, everything.

These two second-graders are pretty passionate when it comes to ending pollution.

They are so passionate that they ended up grabbing a tin can and banging it on the sidewalk while drumming up “donatshons” for the “Invirment.” They weren’t able to collect anything but if they did, they were going to give it to a forest ranger.

Kids are pretty amazing. My son watched a documentary last week with my husband about global warming and the melting of arctic ice caps. I’m sure that’s what inspired this campaign – a campaign that has my full backing.

Heck, I’ll support anything that my child does to try to make the world a better place.

Especially because he and his friend weren’t judging people or telling them what to do, they were on a special mission to save Mother Earth.

And that makes me feel so good inside.