The Wizard of Oz Series by L. Frank Baum

That's right, The Wizard of Oz was not the only book written about the wonderful land of Oz, it's a whole series with 15 books (at least 15 written by L. Frank Baum... his nephew took over the series after that and it's really not worth reading after the 15). After spending the last monthish reading this series here are a few things that struck me.

1) There are two types of books in this series. One type introduces new people into the land of Oz (this comprises most of the first half of the series), and the other type shows the characters fighting some evil force. All of the books deal with some misfortune, but a good handful have the people of Oz fighting the forces of evil and greed and destruction. If you want to go all academic (okay, okay, you talked me into it... I'll go there) you could look at the forces working to destroy the land of Oz and how they relate to problems in America at the time. Especially with greed... since Oz has no money and everyone loves each other it's a very good foil to the American capitalist system and how broken it was in the 1910s and 1920s when these books were written.

2) The land of Oz truly holds the answer to the majority of the problems in our world. How much better would the world work if there was no money and instead everyone was doing their best to help out their neighbors? People would go into professions based on their ability to help other people instead of the amount of money they would make. We would need very few laws because bosses wouldn't take advantage of their employees, businesses wouldn't take advantage of their customers, and individuals wouldn't take advantage of those around them. How much more would we be willing to give if we didn't question other people's motives? It reminds me of a story one of my professor's told towards the end of the semester last year.

There's a homeless man on the street asking people for money. One man stops, talks to the man, and gives him all the money in his pocket, a $5 bill, without passing any judgments on the man. Awhile later another man passes by, stops, talks to the homeless man, gives him $20 out of the $100+, but gives him a lecture on how he expects the man will only use this money to buy drugs or alcohol instead of food. Which man gave the homeless man more?

Although this story isn't the exact same as the situation in the land of Oz, I think that it shows the necessary step to achieve an Oz-like land--getting past our assumptions of people. If we could just quit assuming that every person is trying to take advantage of us, how much better would the world be? I believe that if we quit looking at people with suspicion they would rise to our expectations. And each individual would be happier because they would be looking for the good in people instead of the bad. The world could be a happier place just because we wished it so. You may call it wearing rose colored glasses in a dreary world, but I call it unpeeling the smog covering the world and revealing the techni-color landscape that is Oz.