OF SQUIRRELS, PIGEONS AND POLITICS

What a great morning! I'm sitting here at my window, watching four fat little squirrels playing in the leaves, pausing now and then to take a nibble off a pumpkin I put out for them, or scramble around in the seeds they knocked down out of the feeder earlier. I have some old dry cereal I'll put out later, and a few shelled pecans that taste a little refrigerator-y, but the squirrels won't mind. One is a juvenile, not fully grown, and so cute. He won't be around here for long, though. He's evidently a remnant of the last litter that grew up in one of my nest boxes, and should have left for parts unknown by now. There's one grumpy female in the group that keeps running at him and chasing him away. Probably his mother, who knows it's time for him to do his own thing. Poor little guy. If his mom only knew, it would be okay for him to stay. I'll keep him fed.

At my feet is a tiny, fluffy miniature Sugarplum. Not quite as pretty as the Plum was, doesn't have the lush coat, but she is so cute. She's almost exactly half the size the Plum was, at just under four and a half pounds. She's looking pretty frazzled today, the air is dry and there's a lot of static charge in her hair, so it stands straight out at times. She's so playful and energetic, carries a toy around in her mouth most of the time, trying to persuade someone, anyone, to throw it for her. That game can continue for a very long time, if one is foolish enough to get it started.

I enjoy her the most though, when she gets tired. At those times she gets very clingy, wants to be very close to me, and will lead me to my big old chair if she can. As soon as I settle down in it, she hops into my lap, then climbs up to my shoulder and finds a comfortable spot there, settled on my chest for a nap. She'll sleep for an hour or so, then wakes and goes up on the back of the chair behind my head. She likes to lie up there and play with my hair. She'll pat her little paws around in it, or take strands of it and draw them through her teeth! Not sure what that's all about, but it's restful to me, and she enjoys it. Maltese are odd little dogs. They seem to possess a lot of feline traits, which only makes them that much more fun.

I paused for a moment and took that cereal outside. The squirrels scooted up the tree when I stepped out the door, and peered down at me from their lofty perches. As soon as I returned to my window, they were already on the ground, pushing their little noses around in the pile of cereal, selecting just the right one out of the hundreds of little O's. Then they move to one side, sit upright with tail curved over their back, and holding the bit of cereal in dexterous little paws, they nibble away. For all the time and effort it appears to require to eat one little cheerio, it would seem that squirrels, like people, are prone to make much ado about nothing.

And now the pigeons have arrived. Fortunately, there are only two, not the dozen or more that usually crash the squirrels' parties. When those winged marauders hit the scene, the groceries disappear faster than Depression glass at a garage sale. Since the squirrels outnumber them today, the pigeons are being unusually polite and non-aggressive, just picking around in the grass around the feeding station. They aren't venturing into the pile of seed and cereal that occupies the big flagstones. There is a squirrel sitting right in the middle of the stones, and if a pigeon ventures too close, he leans forward looking as menacing as a squirrel can manage to appear, and the pigeon retreats.

This balance of power is interesting. If there were more pigeons than squirrels, everything would be reversed. The pigeons would be shuffling around in the pile of feed, and the squirrels would be on the fringes, looking hopeful and trying to snatch a stray bit of something, anything. Apparently, there is strength in numbers, and in strength lies power.

There are many parallels between the animal kingdom and the human condition, and I think our newly-elected president would be very wise to study this parallel and realize that the dynamic seen here applies not only to squirrels and pigeons, but to nations as well. If he carries out his campaign threat to disarm America as an "example" to the rest of the world, he is going to learn a bitter lesson, and unfortunately, the rest of us will suffer as well. To disarm is to appear weak, and when one appears weak, whether a nation or an outnumbered pigeon, one will be attacked and dominated.

My late husband was a large and very strong man. I don't recall that he ever got into a real fight with anyone, and he once told me that he only had one actual fight, while in high school. He won, of course, and after that, no one ever challenged him. As he put it, when you look like you could win, no one ever asks you to prove it.

It seems to me that we need to continue the surge in Iraq, defeat Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the insurgents, whoever we need to defeat in order to convince the rest of the Muslim world that they really don't want to challenge us. We need to find Bin Laden and drag his wretched carcass over here and into a courtroom to be tried for the murder of three thousand people. Then we need to put him in a prison cell and feed him nothing but beans and hamhocks for the rest of his miserable life.

Unfortunately, I doubt very seriously that Barack Hussein Obama is going to do any of those things. If he does what he said he would do, he'll pull us out of Iraq and confirm in the minds of the Muslims that we are weak and cowardly. Then he'll dismantle our nuclear armament, drastically reduce the size of our military force, and step meekly aside as the vultures come to devour our way of life.

Well, be that as it may, for this morning I'm going to sit here and laugh at the antics of the squirrel who is now INSIDE the bird feeder, sending seed showering to the stones below, where the other three, the juvenile included, are all but rolling in the bounty. For this morning anyway, life is good.

Be blessed!