While Watching a Fawn

July 22, 2015

For days, I have watched the fawn munch on greenery. It stands as high as my waist and is flecked with white, its fluttery tail a third of the size of my cat’s. Occasionally, the fawn is accompanied by a doe; mostly it is alone. But it is not afraid. It needs to be afraid.

The world is so overpopulated there are mere traces of woods in which deer may walk. Biologists have introduced the concept of wild corridors, strips of land in which wild animals may travel in safety. It has come to this.

Oh, it gets better. Republican Ohio governor John Kasich has announced that global warming is God’s plan. Some plan.

Why are morons coming out of the woodwork like termites? (I have just insulted perfectly ethical termites.) Why, in a country with a constitution which unequivocally calls for separation of church and state, are religious nuts listened to, heeded, about any subject?

Men can’t keep it in their pants, so they say, and half-wit preachers like Jimmy Swaggart and Tammy Faye and the fundamentalists (there’s a rock band: Tammy Faye and the Fundamentalists) can’t keep it in their family Bible.

God, formerly amused at the half-wit religions of the world, clucks his tongue and waits. And watches. And Jesus—whose philosophy has been co-opted by right wing simpletons and assorted madmen—weeps.

Who pays for madmen’s transgressions? Wildlife, open spaces, rain forests, watersheds, wildernesses, prairies, oceans, cancer patients—that’s who. Fawns—that’s who.

The fawn is joined by its mother. They trot along the neighbor’s yard and disappear into the corridor of woods south of my house. They are healthy and beautiful. And innocent.

In other news, Stephen Hawking has launched the most comprehensive and expensive search for intelligent life in the universe. Ironically, we are not it.

Meanwhile, under the banner of religion, the ancestors of the Dark Age monsters, of our own bloody Andrew Jackson and the terrorist George Rogers Clark, having been handed paradise for free, seek to reclaim wild lands for commerce. A St. Louis cemetery is taking over a park. You knew that was coming.

Didn’t you?

 

 

About Eugene Jones Baldwin

I am a writer: non-fiction, fiction, journalism (Alton Telegraph), essays (The Genehouse Chronicles) and have a website: eugenebaldwin.com. I've published a couple dozen short stories and had eleven plays produced. Current projects: "Brother of the Stones" (available on Kindle), a book of short stories; "The Faithful Husband of the Rain, short stories"; "A Black Soldier's Letters Home, WWII,;" "There is No Color in Justice," a commentary on racism; "Ratkillers," a new play. I am an avocational archaeologist and I take parts of my collection of several thousand Indian artifacts (personal finds) to schools, nature centers, libraries etc. and talk about the 20,000 year history of The First people in Illinois. (See link to website) I'm also a playwright (eleven plays produced), musician, historian (authority on the Underground Railroad in Illinois, the Tuskegee Airmen) and teacher.
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