Jim Henson once said that he wanted to make a show that would stop war. Not “promote peace” or “encourage understanding” or any of the other soft language you’d expect from a pitch meeting. Stop war. With puppets. Living in a cave.

Think about the escalation here. The Muppets taught us to accept ourselves. A bear who couldn’t tell jokes. A frog who just wanted to put on a show. A diva pig who loved harder than anyone knew what to do with. A whatever. The Muppets said: you are weird and that is fine. In fact, your weirdness is the point.

Sesame Street taught us to read. It taught us to count. It taught us that people who look different from us are still our neighbors and that sharing is a thing you should probably do. Sesame Street took the radical position that children deserve to be educated regardless of whether their parents could afford preschool, and it delivered that education via a giant yellow bird and a grouch who lived in a trash can.

And then Jim Henson looked at what he had built and said: okay, now let’s end war.

Fraggle Rock is built on a deceptively simple idea. There are Fraggles who play and sing. There are Doozers who build. There are Gorgs who garden. And they are all connected in ways they don’t fully understand. The Fraggles eat the Doozer constructions. The Gorgs think the Fraggles are pests. Nobody sees the full picture. Nobody understands that they need each other. The whole ecosystem works precisely because each group does what they do, and the moment one group decides to dominate or destroy the others, everything falls apart.

That’s not a kids' show. That’s a thesis on geopolitics delivered by felt.

My favorite Fraggle is Wembley. If you know Fraggle Rock you already know why, and if you don’t, let me explain. Wembley is the Fraggle who can’t make up his mind. About anything. He waffles. He second-guesses. He wants everyone to be happy and he ties himself in knots trying to figure out what he thinks versus what the people around him think. He spends most of the series trying to figure out who he is.

I feel that in my bones.

There’s something about watching a small yellow-green puppet struggle with the exact same thing you struggle with as a fully grown adult human that is both deeply comforting and a little embarrassing. Wembley doesn’t know who he is because he’s so busy trying to be what everyone else needs him to be. He agrees with whoever talked to him last. He doesn’t want to pick sides because picking sides means someone might be upset. And over the course of the show he slowly — painfully, sometimes — figures out that having your own voice doesn’t mean you stop caring about other people. It means you care about them honestly instead of performatively.

That’s the thing about Fraggle Rock that I think Henson understood. You can’t end war by telling people war is bad. Everybody knows war is bad. You end war by teaching people that they are connected. That the thing the other group does that annoys you is actually keeping your whole world running. That the Doozer buildings you eat without thinking are someone else’s life’s work. That understanding doesn’t require agreement — it requires paying attention.

Was Jim Henson naive? Maybe. Probably. A puppet show didn’t end war. But it planted something in the heads of every kid who watched it — the idea that the creatures on the other side of the cave wall are not your enemies. They’re just living their lives, same as you, and you’re more connected than you think.

I’m still figuring out who I am. Wembley eventually figured it out. I think Jim Henson would say that’s the whole point — that the figuring out is the thing, and you do it by paying attention to the people around you and having the courage to be yourself anyway.

Dance your cares away. Worry’s for another day.