About 10 days ago I killed a crow on the highway. Driving to a game of golf, a family of crows were cleaning up some road kill on Hwy 11 and one of the younger ones didn’t leave the table soon enough. Unable to swerve because of traffic, I clipped the black bird, sending it flightless into the ditch. As my wife assured me upon the sad telling of the event, there are many crows.
Nonetheless, it bothered me. Partly because I have an old crow that comes each morning for the last three or four years for its morning peanut, and partly because it is a living thing. Not that that makes us life-long buds but we have a relationship. A couple of days before that while on my motorcycle, I was following a transport that killed a bear that was trying to cross the road. And then, coming back from Powassan a day later, I saw a dead cow moose on the road.
While there may be plenty of crows in the world, there are not so many bears and moose. Trying to keep all this in perspective while cleaning the dead bugs off the front of the bike was a reality check. There are a lot of bugs in the world. Then we get the news that a policeman has shot a man in a roadside traffic check. This was followed up by policemen being shot in the streets of Dallas.
Events got completely out of control when the man in the truck killed 84 people on a street in Nice. A couple of days later we get images on our devices of people dead in the streets of Istanbul. It is enough to give you pause before going out on the streets.
What we do to keep our sanity is to keep all these events in perspective – at least that is what the numerous gurus in the media have been telling us. We are only affected by these events if we have a connection to them. If we know a person who has died in one of these tragedies, it affects us more than if we just know the group. Black people will relate to the shootings in the US because of their skin colour or race. Police officers relate to the shootings because of their profession and work culture. I relate a little to the dead in Nice because I have walked on that street by the sea. I have no Turkish blood, never been there, and so have no connection with those events in Istanbul other than worrying about the effect the situation may have on the NATO alliance.
Approximately 150,000 people die each day (360,000 are born each day) and though that number is relentless, I only know a few of them. I suspect my crows are holding their own since they are actually quite smart. The bears and moose, maybe not so much but only because we are crowding them out of existence. The insects, aside from bees, may be doing okay.
I suppose it is only our defense mechanisms that keep us going, not worrying about these human tragedies for more than a few minutes. There are, after all, plenty of people – perhaps more than the old world needs – and we are producing them at an unheard of rate.
It must be a good thing that we have other more important things to keep our minds off world events. Like when and where the next council meeting will be held as they try to elude people and cameras. (I heard a rumour that it will be at a Tim Horton’s but have been unable to confirm which one or the time). And we ought not to be worrying about what the bureaucrats at City Hall will be doing with the license plate data about where and when you park your vehicle on their Lots. Our time would be much better spent worrying about what Big Sister is doing with our money at Queens Park.
So why do I keep thinking about that darn crow?
