Jack Burns Lives!

The Big Day

Chipmunks are gathering food for their winter store. Canada geese and mallards migrate south through the Mississippi Flyway, circling flooded rice fields and soaring through river bottoms in places with names like L’Anguille, Stuttgart and Fair Oaks. Bears in the Smokies are fattening up for winter, getting their fill of berries and goodies as they prepare to head to the roost. A few will produce cubs which will emerge in the spring. Butterflies migrate to Mexico. 

The tomatoes are spent, and it’s time to prepare the garden for winter. The leaves continue to change and more will fall as the mercury drops, fertilizing the soil and protecting it from the winter frost.

The cycle of life. The really important things that sustain life on our little planet. They happen everyday, but most folks are oblivious to what goes on around them. We’re too caught up in stock markets, mortgage rates and elections. Our jobs, ball games, preparing for the holidays. Man made stuff and not all bad, but it does consume our thoughts and too often it results in things that are destructive.

Today, millions of humans will march to places we call precincts, form lines, pull levers or push buttons that signify who they want to be their rulers. I’d say representatives, but let’s not be funny. No one really believes that, do they? 

I suppose it’s important, at least to a debatable degree, since the selection can affect all the really important things most are oblivious to. Migration, inter-species relationships, soil, water, air…biology. Healthy ecosystems. We ignore all the incredible things going on right beneath our feet, under our noses and all around us, because we think we’re all so important.

It just seems so odd to me that this one single event, a U.S. Presidential election, is the national, perhaps even the international, obsession. It seems very small, almost microscopic, in the overall scheme of things. But we’re conceited as hell, self-absorbed and think we’re so goddamned important. 

We aren’t so important, but our actions are important, since we’re the ones mucking up the neighborhood for geese, chipmunks, bear and damn near every life form on the planet. 

So, today we have some choices to make. As for me, I’m going to till my garden in preparation for winter. Cover it with some composted leaves and other organic matter. Spend time outside and soak up all this wonderful fall weather and abundant sunshine.  Watch some birds. Read a book in the garden. Write a letter to a friend. 

I’m voting for change today, but probably not for Obama. Change starts with the choices you make; all the little things you do or don’t do every day. 

Oh, and I’m voting for Ralph Nader simply because he tells the truth, and I won’t be bullied by Democrats that want me to vote for a candidate beholden to monied interests. And Obama can’t win Tennessee so a little old protest vote won’t matter. McCain will carry the slave states.  

I’m going outside to soak up all this life around me. A glorious sun, my garden. Seems appropriate since that’s what we’re fighting and working for. The preservation of life. A restoration of the respect for all life, not just human life.