Everything is Horrible
These geese look pretty placid. However, they are
actually blood-thirsty, homicidal monsters.
If you’ve ever watched the news, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that human beings are uniformly horrible. As I sit typing these words, I have just wrapped up my daily news dump. The highlights include a horrible terrorist attack in Moscow by ISIS, a horrible story about a sex cult, another horrible story about a school shooter, and then a story about the Iranians making cheap explosive drones to export all over the world and murder innocent people, which is also obviously horrible. Just what is wrong with us?
I’ll answer that for you. Nothing is wrong with us. We just live on Planet Earth alongside every other horrible thing God saw fit to put here. For the dispassionate observer, we human beings are just not all that special in the horrible department.
Wet and Wild
I have a little lake for a backyard. Many years ago, when I finally finished medical school, we took the last of the savings my wife had scraped up from my time in the Army and used it to build a dam across a small creek that runs through the secluded stand of Mississippi timber we call home. The resulting modest body of water helped raise my kids.
We were some of those homeschool freaks. Most days, when it was pretty and warm, my kids would go swimming in the lake. They turned the canoe over and used it like a submarine, strategically placed a water hose on a hillside to create a mudslide, and just generally had a good time being miniature unwashed redneck lunatics. I joined them for a while but called it a day when the fish wouldn’t stop nipping at my leg hair.
The lake has been a nexus for some of the most fascinating creatures. My kids would wade out into the water with lunch meat and feed the bass by hand. The water moccasins reproduced like bunnies, spawning an existential battle for extermination that persists to this very day. Over the years, we’ve had beavers, otters, kingfishers, salamanders, ospreys and bald eagles. And then there were the Canadian geese.
Backyard Bedlam
I’ve always wanted to own my own island. Ideally, it would be around 1,100 acres with ample fresh water and an airstrip somewhere off the coast of Belize. However, as I will never be able to afford that, I settled for building my own in the lake behind the house. Our private island sports a diameter of maybe fifteen feet and is dominated by a single willow tree. We call it Australia (the island, not the tree. A willow tree called Australia would be stupid.) Our island is also apparently some seriously prime real estate for migrating Canadian geese.
Come springtime every year the Canadian geese invade the place like it is Dieppe in 1942. They are attractive enough creatures. However, they make for simply ghastly B&B guests. Rare is the day during goose season that those blasted monsters don’t ring in the morning at 0500 with their cacophonous honking. It’s not a lack of resources that drives that train. They just can’t seem to share.
The lake is plenty big to support a dozen or more of these big feathery monsters. However, there precipitates every year this massive battle for supremacy to see which mating pair earns the title to the island. It’s like the epic movie “The Highlander.” Apparently, there can be only one.
One morning, instead of just quietly hating them, I dragged my laptop out onto the back porch to watch. I had never done that before. Wow. Roman arena blood sports have got nothing on these guys.
The momma geese sit off to the side and wisely just spectate. The dads fight literally to the death, honking madly throughout. They smack into each other, flap their wings to pummel their opponents, and then go in for the kill. The kill shot is to grab the opponent by the neck and then hold their heads underwater until they drown. Over the years we have awakened to find dead geese floating in the lake a couple of times.
Animals would have nuclear bombs, too, if only they had opposable thumbs.
Embrace the Darkness
And that brings me to my point. Everything is horrible. All these stupid geese need to do is get along. There’s plenty of room and likely strength in numbers, but they just can’t bring themselves to do so. And it turns out that absolutely everything in the world is like that.
That adorable little puppy who is gleefully gnawing on his high-pitched squeaky toy? In his precious little mind, he is actually ripping the very life out of some helpless creature. The fluffy little kitten pouncing on the laser spot? In his imagination, he’s killing stuff, too. Leave two painfully cute human babies together for a couple of minutes, and one of them will invariably hit the other in the head with a big plastic toy telephone. Koala bears, field mice, frogs, lizards and amoebas — everything is frankly horrible. We just live in a fallen world. To imagine otherwise is simply magical thinking.
So, enjoy your life. There’s plenty of good, safe fun to be found amidst all that bedlam. However, face it with your eyes open. In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, trust but verify. That’s why I carry a gun whenever I’m not asleep or in the shower. Whether it is wilderness survival, business, interpersonal relationships or politics, never forget that absolutely everything is horrible.
