The robins have not yet appeared out my window. It is
still too cold. The squirrels, meanwhile, go about their
business year around, finding nuts, even pieces of bread
left by kind people. Animals of all kind are wise, while
we human beings are mostly lost in our illusion of what
constitutes worth. Deer and elk up in the high country
do not miss the chaos we human beings call civilization.
The Civil War, for example, was, by no means, civil.
Nowadays the scholars think that possibly as many as
700,000 men lost their lives over the horror of human
*******. Not for a second would even one rabbit condone
slavery, but our Constitution made it legal. A buffalo, if there
still is one, would never **** with impunity a black 13
year old girl, then sell her for a handsome profit to another
American citizen who happened to be a slave owner
himself. Do you think a worm or an otter would brook
60 lashes to a slave who had the audacity to try to learn
how to read or write? Slavery's child, racism, was never
just in the Deep South. Today, this moral disease permeates
every town and city in our "democracy" from sea to shining
sea. When do you think the robin will reappear? When do
think humanity will become as moral as any raccoon or fox?
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet and human-rights advocate his entire adult life. He recently finished his novel, A CHILD FOR AMARANTH.