Out on the OP - LP (3.2.13)

Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day 
--Home on the Range, Roy Rogers
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Happy Sunday, Ranger readers.  Not being an American football aficionado, today is a wide-open, quiet day.  What's on you mind?  It is barely possibly to get Ranger to discourse on any matters in the world which do not go "BOOM!", but perhaps some of you are game.

Our Sunday open blog. "Out on the OP -LP" doesn't get much action, and I'm wondering how to change that.  If there's any topic -- ANY topic -- that piques your interest now, please let us know.  As always, RangerAgainstWar is always a place for dialog and discovery, but this feature was intended to be an advice column, of sorts.  We wouldn't pretend to fill the recently departed Dear Abby's shoes (though others have), but give us a spin; we are about as qualified as she was, which is to say, we are opinionated, and not afraid to say it.

Maybe your issue is also that of another, and shared difficulties are often halved, as some wise person said.  We think a militarily-minded advice column is a neat idea, and hope you do too.

So, shoot.

On the OP - LP: Varmageddon

Guns are too quick.
You can't savor all the little emotions
--The Dark Knight (2008)

He was especially hard on the little things
the helpless and the gentle creatures
--Raising Arizona (1987)

My religion is kindness
--The Dalai Lama
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Topic for consideration: How do you interact with the creatures in your world?

Varmageddon is a bullet manufactured by the Nosler Corporation specifically for waxing little critters. Yesterday I read an article in a hunting magazine which advocated for coyote hunting in Montana and Wyoming in the winter as the coyotes are starving and therefore must be on the move.

It struck Ranger as an odd reaction: Animals are starving, therefore, kill them. Lotsa kills to be had as a starvation dividend. My relationship with nature is different.

The animals passing through my compound do not starve because I provide them food and water to help them sustain their lives. Rattlesnakes have even drunk from my automatic waterers. Water is the most dire need for most animals, especially in the summer, and in urban environments. It will soon be the limiting resource on human life, as well. (Many of us do not see that because the water always flows when we turn the faucet.)

In return for allowing the animals forage, I get to see fifteen wild turkeys with three mature males safely eating 20 yards from my bedroom window. Same for deer, coyotes, foxes, squirrels and rabbits. Now that my dogs are no longer on patrol and squirrels are no longer being shot, rabbits and squirrels frolic in the front lawn and have taken over the water from the dog bowl.

Buddy the dog has entered the cycle of life, too, and his passage allows the squirrels ascendency. Every now and again the urge comes to kill one and place it on Buddy's grave, but I have fought that impulse so far. Enjoying this ebullient life refreshes my jaded soul.

The most common request from people who know my property is, "Can I come over and kill a few deer this year?" They do not get it.

Changes have happened over the 20 years spent on this acreage. The once-plentiful whippoorwills have disappeared and the white egrets have become a rare sight. Ditto the honeybees and butterflies. Is this due to the pesticides, herbicides and fungicides so liberally dosed on the local environment through the largess of truck farming?

There is an ebb and flow to life and it is at our peril that we ignore this fact. The whippoorwills used to sing me to sleep and they are missed. A coyote or a rattler could have destroyed this family of birds, yet that too is the cycle of life and the pattern of nature.

My critters will have a haven as long as I can hold onto this land. My dominion over the beast will be one of conservation. The world is filled with too much killing.

--Jim

Out on the OP - LP, 14 July 12

Again we fail to make amends
And wend our way between intents
And looking back, not moving on
Oh but something's always wrong
--Something's Always Wrong,
Toad the Wet Sprocket

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Time for the Second Edition of "Out on the OP - LP", what we hope will be a regular feature here at RangerAgainstWar.

We are tweaking things, trying to find out how to make it something in which you will enjoy participating. To that end, we will try a leading question, to see what thoughts it might dredge up. You are not, however, constrained by the topic. As always, R.A.W. is a free-fire zone.

Topic: Accommodation


I mused this week upon the uneasy accommodation I have with the tree frog who has made an abode out of my mailbox. As I am not a little boy, meeting wet frogs has always been a fraught issue for me. Yet I know I will have to meet the frog daily as he leaps out when I remove the mail, or just sits on an envelop until I flick him off.

I wonder: Is it not terrifying to him when the postman drops a particularly large bunch of mail in the box., thoughtlessly, without heed to the fact that he is disrupting someone's lair? How does the frog sleep, never knowing when something will be dropped into the post box? What is it about the black metal box that keeps him there, braving bodily damage?

Then I thought about myself -- it seems we all make poor choices at times in order to accommodate. Friend and professor emeritus of sociology at FAMU, Charles U. Smith, once mused about the forms accommodation takes, from the simple idea of acquired changes in the behavior of individuals to help them to adjust to their environment to Lundberg's more dire idea of people's simple desire to relieve the fatigue and tension of competition and conflict -- accommodation not as a way to reach a higher state, like harmony, but as a technique simply to be able to exist.

He mentioned how he had accommodated to being raised in poverty by being penurious, and how difficult it was for him even today to splurge on a filet mignon over a flank steak, when he could well afford the former.

What accommodations do you make, and why? Is it always better to determine one's desires outright versus accommodating to another? Are there certain issues upon which one should never accommodate? Anything else on the topic?