My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me.. I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you..you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day. Tom Waits
About This Quote

In the cartoon, the loggers are the ones who cut down all the straight trees and turned them into toothpicks. They didn't give a damn about the crooked tree, because it wasn't useful for them. The crooked tree represents people who are different.

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