Do you know that feeling you get around 3 a.m. when you’re forcibly peeling your eyelids open in order to finish the mountainous to-do list that you pushed off all day because you were too tired from doing the exact same thing the night before?

It is the time of night when the creatures and madmen stir, create bad habits or decide to enforce better ones.

Magic.

This semester, 3 a.m. has become a time of grace in my life. The hour of barely there epiphany, critical thought and a search for deeper meaning and contemplation of my future. Last night, I pried my eyes open in order to brainstorm lesson plans for my newly found teaching position at The Norfolk Art Center.

I signed on to teach a handful of random courses, my most anticipated being “Read, Imagine and Create,” which allows me to read a book to my class and then form an art project with them pertaining to the story and its concepts.

I have found that it is a very important time for children’s books in our country. Most current events deal with such overwhelming levels of complexity that sometimes the only true way to grasp any of it is through the act of simplification.

This thought led me to watch hours of brilliantly scratchy 1970s Dr. Seuss cartoons on YouTube.

I remembered from my own childhood how easily “The Sneetches and Other Stories” described the division of social class.

Half of the yellow creatures prance around with stars on their stomachs declaring themselves better than those without stars, and no matter what the starless do, they never amount to the “rank” of those with the plastered green shapes (until the moral ending; read the book).

I ended up binge watching all of them, finding a direct correlation between each beautifully crafted rhyme and the world I am currently living in. Green stars might as well be painfully red hats with white embroidered letters creating mischief within the midst of our history, “Make America ___________ (fill in the blank, it’s your preference).

And tonight, at 3 a.m. after scrolling through blogs filled with hate messages, reading articles about fascism, bigotry and the exclusion of basic human values, I sit and wonder how Dr. Seuss knew that these were the stories that would last?

He probably didn’t realize in the copy-written glory of the 1950s that themes of division, discrimination and humans destroying the environment through financial corruption and greed (my absolute favorite, “The Lorax”) would exist as a reality.

Our president wants to take away the Environmental Protection Agency because it regulates the business industry to make sure they’re not abusing, polluting, destroying, fracking, shaking or creating unnatural change within the bounds of the Earth and its sparse resources.

I guess he’s never practiced meditative breathing under the veil of the night like the dreamers—Dr. Seuss, the scientists, the hippies and I sparking simultaneously at 3 a.m.

In the meantime I’ll be teaching the children how to locate and cut up those inherently evil green stars and turn the shaking world around them into a land of papier-mâché’ tolerance.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

-Dr. Seuss