Extended Essay New Beginning

Elizabeth Derstine

Ann Hostter

Creative Nonfiction

We never quite know how our parents died. Phoebe sometimes wants to start the story while her parents are still alive and trial through their death but that never interests Iona and me much. It wasn’t that Phoebe’s detailed back stories of her huddled unnoticed in the closet while her parents are stabbed in their sleep scares us. I had seen the torture machine in Princess Bride, I had memorized “remember remember the 5^th of November the gunpowder treason and plot” for my British second grade teacher, I know that evil exists. But, the exposition focuses too much on our parents and the point of our imaginary games is not that they are gone but that we are still here.

During recess a smattering of students play “the ground is lava” on the jungle gym, a gaggle of girls crack the acorns that fall from the great big tree in the center of the macadam and set the soft insides in a pile for squirrels, and our teacher referees several games of four square because they could get out of hand. Iona, Phoebe and I play orphans-- normally orphaned cats. We press into a corner of the court yard, sheltered by the brick walls of the school building, and crawl around on all fours, gravel sticking to our bare knees as our colorful stretchy shorts inching up our midriffs. As we crawl we talk out our story, which always follows a similar plot line—are parents are dead and we were trying to survive on our own. Sometimes a man adopts us but he always turns out to have sinister motives (such as feeding us to his shark or forcing us to clean for him using our cat fur as mops) so we run away and learn how to live by nothing but our own wits.

None of us had read Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Harry Potter, or Jane Eyre but we already knew that orphans were awarded main character. “When orphans succeed against all odds, their success ultimately becomes ours. We can look to orphans and say, ‘you see, there is hope for all of us if even this orphan child can overcome obstacles and succeed (Kimball 559).”  Since the orphan is the epitome of loneliness in literature it is through their own virtue and self- motivation that they overcome the obstacles they do.

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Let’s say you and I are walking down a city street when a woman approaches you with a handful of ten dollar bills. She tells you that you can keep some of the money as long as you offer some to me and I accept it. The amount you offer me is up to you but if I don’t accept what you offer, then neither of us gets to keep any of the money.  When you offer me a 60-40 split, $60 for you $40 for me, we would both walk away richer than we had been but I feel a strong sense of unfairness. I refuse and the woman walks away with the money.

This scenario, also called the Ultimatum game, is an economic experiment. It led to the discovery of inequity aversion. Even primates demonstrate something resembling inequity aversion. Researchers experimented with brown capuchin monkeys. They would ask the trained monkeys to perform certain tasks and the monkeys, after observing a companion of similar social rank receive a juicy grape for performing the same task, would become uncooperative if offered a cucumber.

                               

David Housman – fairness and equity research