What happens next? Fuller hopes that we've embarked on a decades-long conversation that will radically alter how we treat one another. "It's going to be as unpleasant and as uncomfortable as was the conversation about sexism, and it will reverberate in the family, the bedroom, the boardroom, internationally," Fuller says, smiling slightly to indicate that he's aware how grandiose he sounds. This man who has set out, quixotically perhaps but with great sincerity, to improve the world glows with the sort of visionary fervor that comes from having seen a better tomorrow. As he sees it, we're closing in on a time when we will view rankism "in the same way that most of us have now come to view racism and sexism—as behaviors no longer to be sanctioned. It is not hard to imagine a day when everyone's equal dignity will be as self-evident as everyone's equal right to own property or to free speech." In my own story, understanding what Bob Fuller has seen definitely qualifies as a eureka moment.

Elaina Richardson is a frequent contributor to O.

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