I loved Smarties as a kid. Of course I did. Every kid did. They used to come in a tube, like this:
And the little plastic cap had a letter on it - educational sweets! But now, they come in, oh, something else, I don't know, I'm old. Anyway, for those outside the UK and Ireland and wherever else they may be sold, Smarties are like M&Ms. Just a bit bigger, and a bit better. Small chocolate sweets with a coloured shell, that's the point here.
Imagine a bowl of them. A big bowl. No, a vat. Lots of them, all poured in together. Every one is a different aspect of a human - a personality trait, a skill, a strength, a weakness. This one means you enjoy swimming, this one that you hate noisy parties, this one that you're good at sculpting, this one that you can't stand the taste of prawns. And so on. You're going to take a mug, scoop up a mugful of Smarties, and all those distinct human details, they will come together to make up you. Everyone gets the same size mug and scoops from the same container, the same bits and bobs of a human, but no two people get exactly the same Smarties. We all get a different mixture, unique to us. Nobody has ever nor will ever have quite the same Smarties as you.
However, by chance, there's a lot more green Smarties than any other colour. And so getting a preponderance of green Smarties is common. The world we take our Smarties into is defined by people who go through life with mugfuls of green Smarties. Consequently, green Smarties come to be seen as the normal Smarties, standard Smarties, the right colour for Smarties.
If you have a few Smarties that aren't green, well, that just makes you distinctive, standing out from the crowd. A few more, and perhaps you're a touch eccentric. But if you have a lot of Smarties that aren't green, if most of your Smarties aren't green, then you're not normal, there's something wrong with you, you've got a disease, you've been the victim of some conspiracy by producers of other-coloured Smarties. You're told that you don't belong. People who only got green Smarties appoint themselves your spokesperson, and campaign for a world where all Smarties are green.
But then you look at the green Smarties, and they're just the same as the others. They're not better, they're not worse, there are just more of them. But the blue Smarties and the red Smarties and the yellow Smarties and whatever other colours they came in, I can't remember (blue were introduced when I was a kid, and were rumoured - wrongly - to be hallucinogenic, but that's another story entirely), those other colours, they taste just the same as the green ones.
Plus there are orange ones, which are different, they contain orange chocolate. Some people like that, some don't. I do. Either way, they add that little bit of variety, an occasional hint of something slightly distinct.
They're all Smarties, however. And it would be ridiculous to say that the green were better and correct just because there are more of them, wouldn't it?
And the little plastic cap had a letter on it - educational sweets! But now, they come in, oh, something else, I don't know, I'm old. Anyway, for those outside the UK and Ireland and wherever else they may be sold, Smarties are like M&Ms. Just a bit bigger, and a bit better. Small chocolate sweets with a coloured shell, that's the point here.
Imagine a bowl of them. A big bowl. No, a vat. Lots of them, all poured in together. Every one is a different aspect of a human - a personality trait, a skill, a strength, a weakness. This one means you enjoy swimming, this one that you hate noisy parties, this one that you're good at sculpting, this one that you can't stand the taste of prawns. And so on. You're going to take a mug, scoop up a mugful of Smarties, and all those distinct human details, they will come together to make up you. Everyone gets the same size mug and scoops from the same container, the same bits and bobs of a human, but no two people get exactly the same Smarties. We all get a different mixture, unique to us. Nobody has ever nor will ever have quite the same Smarties as you.
However, by chance, there's a lot more green Smarties than any other colour. And so getting a preponderance of green Smarties is common. The world we take our Smarties into is defined by people who go through life with mugfuls of green Smarties. Consequently, green Smarties come to be seen as the normal Smarties, standard Smarties, the right colour for Smarties.
If you have a few Smarties that aren't green, well, that just makes you distinctive, standing out from the crowd. A few more, and perhaps you're a touch eccentric. But if you have a lot of Smarties that aren't green, if most of your Smarties aren't green, then you're not normal, there's something wrong with you, you've got a disease, you've been the victim of some conspiracy by producers of other-coloured Smarties. You're told that you don't belong. People who only got green Smarties appoint themselves your spokesperson, and campaign for a world where all Smarties are green.
But then you look at the green Smarties, and they're just the same as the others. They're not better, they're not worse, there are just more of them. But the blue Smarties and the red Smarties and the yellow Smarties and whatever other colours they came in, I can't remember (blue were introduced when I was a kid, and were rumoured - wrongly - to be hallucinogenic, but that's another story entirely), those other colours, they taste just the same as the green ones.
Plus there are orange ones, which are different, they contain orange chocolate. Some people like that, some don't. I do. Either way, they add that little bit of variety, an occasional hint of something slightly distinct.
They're all Smarties, however. And it would be ridiculous to say that the green were better and correct just because there are more of them, wouldn't it?
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