This essay was a finalist in the How We Saved the World essay contest, where people wrote as if it was 2050 when the world was working, saying how we got there starting with something they did. Here's the intro to this presentation of results, with links to the other finalists and an invitation to make comments about the contest.

21

The Power of Transparency

Back in 2024, at the age of nine, I came home from school one day in tears. My mother gave me a tight hug before asking what was wrong. I explained that when I stood in front of the room to give my book report on The Uninhabitable Earth, I kept stuttering. My classmates, some of whom I had considered friends, started laughing at me.

My mother took a step back and squinted at me. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s why you’re crying?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said.

“You’re kidding me?”

“No.”

“But it’s a wonderful thing to make people laugh. Why in the world are you upset about it?”

“I don’t want to ever talk again in public.”

“Nonsense. You just have to be transparent. Begin every speech by saying ‘My friends, I’m going to stutter because I’m a stutterer and there have been a lot of great stutterers.’”

“Who?”

“Oh, it’s an exclusive club. Sir Isaac Newton was a stutterer all his life.’”

“The guy who invented gravity?”

“Yeah. An apple fell on his head, and by the time he said, ‘Wha-wha-wha-wha-what happened,’ he had figured it out.”

“So I should be proud of being a stutterer?”

“Of course. It’s a great gift you have. Always be transparent about everything in life. Never hide anything from anybody. That’s the secret to success in life. You need to find a way to keep talking in front of people, so that you can really begin to enjoy your stutter.”

I found a way. I practiced magic tricks. All day long, I worked on my manual dexterity so that I could hide coins behind my fingers. I learned to misdirect my audience. I practiced my craft in front of friends. I began my shows by saying, “Hi, I’m a stutterer, and I’m going to ma-ma-make this quarter dis-dis-disappear.” Soon enough, I was making rabbits disappear.

In my teen years, as I became more skilled and accomplished as a magician, and began confidently performing in front of large crowds, my stutter left me. I was concerned, and asked my mother what to do about it.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “There have been many great people who didn’t stutter. Nelson Mandela didn’t stutter.”

“Really?”

“The man spent twenty-seven years in prison, where he had a lot of work to do. He had to figure out how to get out of prison and bring freedom and justice to his people. Even if he wanted to stutter, he just didn’t have time for it. So not stuttering is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Just keep doing your magic. You’ve apparently made your stuttering disappear. That’s quite a trick. Explain to your audience that you’re an ex-stutterer. Always be transparent.”

“But I’m not transparent.”

“You’re not?”

“No. That’s the essence of being a magician. I’m tricking people.”

“Then maybe you have to explain your tricks. Always be transparent.”

I took my mother’s advice. I would do a trick, then explain to the audience how I did it. This made me a sensation. Soon I had my own show at the biggest clubs in Las Vegas, and I wasn’t yet even twenty years old. I became famous as The Magician who Amazes and Explains.

I caught a lot of flak from other magicians. They hated me for violating the Magician’s Oath, a code of ethics that insists that our tricks must not be explained. I didn’t care. Sure, I understood their objection to my approach to magic, but then again, they didn’t have my mother.

Soon, I found myself earning $250,000 per show. I had so much money to invest that I decided to improve the quality of the food I was eating on the road. I bought a well-known restaurant in Vegas, and revamped the interior so that the kitchen was in the center of the restaurant, behind glass walls. The customers could watch their food being prepared by magnificent chefs. Everyone loved this form of transparency, and before I knew it, I had a worldwide chain of restaurants called Clear Kitchen. I became a multi-billionaire.

In 2044, at the age of twenty-nine, I was interviewed by a business reporter for The Guardian, who pointed out to me that, while my kitchens themselves were transparent, I was not being transparent about the source of the food being served there. I felt that she made an excellent point.

That’s when began making deals with the small organic farms where I sourced my fruits and vegetables. I arranged to have tours conducted by the farmers so that the public could see where the produce served at Clear Kitchen was grown. These tours became very popular, and lucrative for the farmers.

I also bought existing meatpacking plants, where the meat came from, and made sure that all the slaughterhouses were encased in glass walls. Paul McCartney had long ago suggested doing so, and I was amazed that so many decades had gone by without anyone taking him up on the idea. The man’s a Beatle, after all—you’d think people would recognize genius in an idea coming from a genius.

Once again, people started hating me–especially people in the meat industry. I didn’t care. My food industry critics had something against transparency, but then again, they didn’t know my mother.

I put commercials on television featuring the organic produce farms where Clear Kitchens sourced its food, as well as our transparent slaughterhouses. These commercials caused outrage, and in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission even got upset about the blood and spilled cow guts shown on our commercials, but we live under the rules of capitalism, and my legal team argued successfully before the Supreme Court that Clear Kitchen should be allowed to promote its own products, as long as it did so honestly and transparently.

Then a funny thing happened, all over the world. The meat industry  dried up. In my restaurants, everyone ordered the vegan dishes and skipped the meat dishes. That was fine with me. I took the meat dishes off the menu and made Clear Kitchen an international vegan chain serving only organically grown plant foods.

Everywhere, ranches started going out of business. I bought them for pennies on the dollar, took their fences down, and rewilded the land. Trees, then forests, then streams, then wildlife, starting coming back.

Last year, in 2049, the world was shocked to learn that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dropped for the first time in living memory. This year, it has dropped even more dramatically, as the forests return and the oceans are being restored to health, with thriving populations of fish and sea mammals. Even the sea forests are regenerating, and there is renewed hope for the coral. The polar ice caps are starting to come back, as are the polar bears.

Around the world, people are getting healthier. Heart disease is disappearing. Cardiologists are seeking new careers; in some countries, there are even programs to help get them trained as organic farmers.

Strangely enough, conflict has been reduced in the world. Nations plagued by centuries-old conflicts have begun living in peace with their neighbors.

I have written a new global bestseller called Remembering Meat-Eating and War.

I am being credited for leading a successful, climate-changing, glorious vegan transformation of the world. I have even been referred to with such names as The Beacon of Non-Violence, The Forest Whisperer, and The Gandhi of the 21st Century.

All of this attention embarrasses me. It is unjustified. Let me be transparent about it. The sweet transformation we are witnessing has very little to do with me.

The credit belongs to my mother. She just wanted to make me feel better about stuttering.