My mom says it’s never just one possum.
She said it last night when my wife told her we found a young
possum literally hanging out in our garage. And mom was right, as I learned
when I plunged into the world of possum-stalking. The secret, I discovered, is
to play possum…let them come to you. No amount of hollering and broom banging
will bring them out. Find a comfy seat and still your mind. Your body, and the
possums, will follow.
I sat on my gardening stool, broom held across my thighs
while I silently recited the Native American prayer “Let Me Walk in Beauty.” My
eyes held steady to a blank place on the floor, my hearing and sight tuned for
the slightest sound or motion. As a splendid sense of stillness welled up in
me, I thought about our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The Indians of North America limited their numbers and their
hunting, but these sustainable ways were not always the rule. In his book “A
Short History of Progress”, Ronald Wright recounts how our Cro-Magnon ancestors
got a little too good at killing. Not only did they wipe out their Neanderthal competitors,
says Wright, but their hunting skills brought on an unprecedented level of non-hominid
animal extinctions. This eventually led to their own population implosion. Wright
argues that this pattern – explosive progress followed by disaster – has been
repeated throughout human history, but each time the stakes are raised. And
humans don’t seem to be getting it: in advancing from the split stone to the
split atom, we’ve put the future of our whole earth at risk.
Perhaps it’s because we can be so good at letting ourselves
be fooled. Consider how Karl Rove has perfected the foolmaker’s
art. His “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” defamed a war hero, giving his duty-dodging
“war president” boss the edge for re-election. This is the same President who
swore to fire the White House staffer who leaked the identity of CIA undercover
agent Valerie Plame, an agent who was working to keep
WMD from terrorists; a leak that was intended to punish her husband Joe Wilson
for publicly questioning the Bushadmin’s fiction
about Iraq WMD. When we recently learned *Rove* was the leaker,
the President waffled, then distracted the media with the Roberts nomination
and the Bolton recess appointment (nicely done, Karl!) Perhaps Bush will next
award Rove the Presidential Medal of Freedom; last year he gave it to the CIA’s
George Tenet (whose bad intelligence about Iraqi WMDs
helped send us to Iraq) and Paul Bremer (whose botched Iraq reconstruction job
fueled the insurgency that’s now killing Americans and Iraqis by the score.)
As Obi Wan said, “Who’s more foolish: the fool or the fool
who follows him?” Congress enacts the Bush energy plan, giving oil companies
more tax breaks while ignoring gas guzzlers, hoping we might think we won an environmental
victory because ANWR wasn’t opened up for drilling (oh, thank you for not
looting our house *and* raping our daughter… this year.)
Perhaps they are counting on “war fatigue”, where we grow
tired of reading about the newly-deads and turn the
page. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, isn’t turning the page.
She’s sitting in vigil outside Bush’s Texas ranch, demanding the truth from her
President. When I learned *another* close co-worker was being called out of
reserve for a year of Middle East duty, I wasn’t too fatigued to let my outrage
at Bush’s war spark this column.
Nor am I too tired to remember the home front, where we can
end the oil addiction that drives us to war. A few days after the City Council
voted unanimously to support reducing Petaluma’s greenhouse gas emissions 25%
below 1990 levels by 2015, I wrote them asking to install bike lanes when
Petaluma Boulevard North was repaved. Too late for this time, I was told. But
the seed was planted.
So I sat patiently last night, and eventually swept all *three*
little possums from my garage. Rove still works for Bush, Bush is still
President, and global disaster looms. But I still have my broom.