Full disclosure: A call from the home office yesterday asked me to track down Oliver Luck, which can be a fairly simple thing to do, only this time I was to ask the athletic director about reading Dr. Seuss to local children.

This did not get me excited.

Then I saw this picture …

That’s amazing. I have the same sweater. I must, therefore, be part of some sort of elite class, a type of people with big salaries, considerable intelligence and unquenchable determination.

I must be a Star-bellied Sneetch.

And I must have missed the point when I was younger, which is what Luck sought to prevent Wednesday. He insisted he read “The Sneetches” to teach the kids that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing to be a Star-bellied Sneetch. Nor was is a bad thing to be a Pain-bellied Sneetch. It was just bad to discriminate among Sneetches and to form opinions and create divisions based on appearances.

This isn’t just some silly Dr. Seuss story that crafts rhymes and tongue twisters. Well, it is that and it does that, but it’s also worth so much more.

“I picked the story for a reason,” Luck said. “I think the lesson of the Star-bellied and the Plain-bellied Sneetches is one of those sort of eternal lessons that always needs to be taught, which is that appearances are insignificant.

“Whether you’re Star-bellied or not, you’re not better than anybody else based on how you look. It’s really a story about how quickly people can change their stripes – or in this case, change their stars.”