It might be catching

Must be one of those bugs going around… I’ve spent the last few days laid up with some kind of sinus/respiratory infection. Not pretty, let me tell you—and my sympathies go out to anyone else in a similar situation. (Hopefully, I’ll be all better by the time you read this.) But you know how it is—in the right conditions, a virus (which is, after all, nothing more than a little packet of information) can spread at a truly astonishing rate.

Fortunately, this doesn’t just apply to microbes. Ideas too can be contagious, and some produce wonderful symptoms when they infect the right hosts. Take a look at the results of an outbreak that happened last week at the Wallenpaupack Area School District in Pennsylvania, where my wife is the librarian at the North Primary School.

Patient Zero in this case was none other than Oprah Winfrey, and the original means of transmission was her new TV show “Oprah’s Big Give” ( abc.go.com/primetime/oprahsbiggive ). Rocky and Sue, the morning drive radio personalities from Scranton’s WKRZ, caught the bug and decided to do a local version. In their “Little Give,” local individuals would get $10 each, and then try to make the money grow while helping a local charity or needy family. Becky Schaepe, a first grade teacher at the North Primary, applied and was accepted. The object of her concern was a first grader named Meadow Quinn, who has neurofibromatosis and is presently fed via feeding tube. A feeding clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia would help her learn to eat normally—but her family’s health insurance company won’t cover the expense. So Becky put out the call, and within days school staff and families had organized several fundraising events, including a talent show, a yard sale and an after-school fair with games and entertainment. (As of press time, I don’t know how much has been collected, but I’m sure more will be appreciated. If you’d like to help, send donations to: “Wallenpaupack’s Big Give,” c/o Becky Schaepe, Wallenpaupack North Primary School, 158 Atlantic Ave, Hawley, PA 18428, or contact Becky Schaepe at schaepbe@wallenpaupack.org .)

This kind of thing happens all the time, of course. A family’s house burns down, or someone gets a life-altering diagnosis, and the community pulls together and chips in. Such efforts evoke the very best in us, and show what we can accomplish together. But they also make me think of the old fable of the babies in the river.

Maybe you know this one already: there was this small village on a riverbank, and a villager one day saw a baby floating down the river in a basket. He quickly swam out and saved the child. But the next day there were two, the next four, then eight, every day more babies floating downstream. The villagers set up watchtowers, spread out nets, and trained rescue squads, and while they occasionally missed one, most of the babies were saved—and they felt some justifiable pride in their efforts. One day, however, it occurred to someone to ask where all the babies were coming from in the first place…

In some versions of this story, the village elders decide that all available resources are needed to help the babies and decline to send anyone upriver to investigate. In some, the villager sets off himself to find out what’s going on. In one, the elders head upriver and find a bored ogre, who’s setting the babies adrift just for fun, and hire him to help build a school instead. But the moral is the same: it’s not enough to save the babies; we have to go the next step, and find the ogre.

Spread that one around, would you?

- Skip Mendler