I am giddy at the thought that this little graphic I cooked up has helped so many people think about this issue and spawned so many conversations in just the past few years. Which, I think, entirely misses the point. This early revision, posted within four months of mine, replaced my original words to differentiate equality from justice.Ĭuriously, there was no shortage of complaints that the kids were just freeloaders and should buy a ticket to be inside the stadium if they want to watch the game.

There are literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of different adaptations, most with wording changes, but some that actually manipulated the original image as well to convey a slightly different idea. If I missed any instances worth mentioning, please let me know. Note that this article documents just a tiny fraction of the thousands of instances where this image and its variations can be found across the Internet, and I can’t be sure that any of the links below are the original places these images were first posted. So, today, I decided to go back and use the magic of Google to see if I could track down some of its many variations and post them here quasi-chronologically. My original post (below) racked up around 3,000 +1s and over 1,000 shares, which was just amazing to me, especially given that Google+ was barely 18 months old and still fairly small as social sites go.īut, unbeknownst to me, as the Internet is so wonderfully amazing at doing, my original graphic was being adapted, modified, and repurposed in a mind-blowing variety of ways, and then shared and redistributed all over the place. So, I grabbed a public photo of Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park*, a stock photo of a crate, clip art of a fence, and then spent a half-hour or so in Powerpoint concocting an image that I then posted on Google+. I thought the easiest example of this concept is kids of different heights trying to see over a fence. I was trying to clarify why, to me (and, I generalized, to liberals), “equal opportunity” alone wasn’t a satisfactory goal and that we should somehow take into consideration equality of outcomes. How did this happen? Back in 2012, shortly after th e US elections, I had crafted up a graphic to illustrate my point in an argument I was having with a conservative activist. It was the concept behind my image, but completely redrawn (and by someone with actual artistic talent!).

My jaw hit the keyboard…that was my image, but it also wasn’t my image. The Facebook post my friend sent me showing how far my original graphic had been adapted.

Dawn of war 3 meme