We All Could Learn Something from Balboa the Squirrel

As I lazed the days away in my hammock during my vacation last week, I found that I got the most entertainment out of watching a little Douglas Squirrel go about his daily work of preparing for winter. As cold as it was at night at 10,000 feet in the Rockies, winter seemed to be just about there and this little guy was hard at it.
I didn’t really pay much attention to him the first day until he (or she, I don’t know, I didn’t look that close) jumped up on to our picnic table with something large in its mouth. I later was to learn that the little critter was gathering mushrooms, of all things.
From then on, he had my attention and that of my darling wife (who remains unidentified for her reputation’s protection). From well before I rolled out of our tent, until the last rays of sun dropped behind the ridgeline, Balboa was a blur of activity.
I decided to call him Balboa because Rocky was too cliché, and all I could hear in my head as he ran full-tilt from the mushroom patch that seemed to constantly have a new cap bursting through the pine straw to one of the nearby trees was the Rocky theme, so I called him Balboa. He didn’t seem to mind.
The more we watched, the more we learned about the critter and the more I thought how things might be better all around if people were more like Balboa the Squirrel. Here was a little rodent, and he was rather small, that had figured out how to make the most of the available food source. While I’m sure he was harvesting pinecone seeds and berries too, he was actually processing the mushrooms. He would cut it down, carry it onto a high branch and tuck it away to dry in the sun before taking it to his food cache. Or at least that’s how it looked.
All day long, back and forth, with only one thing on his mind: survival. That, after all, is his job; stay alive and reproduce. Balboa was a tireless laborer.
As I said, I thought about how I wish that people were more like Balboa the Squirrel and not because I want them to eat a lot of mushrooms. I wish they had his drive, his perseverance and his vision.
He knows what is coming even though he has no weatherman and he understands that if he wants to live, he has to build up his supplies. He has to invest the time to survive.
Too many people today, from politicians to day laborers, don’t want to invest the time to survive. They want everything handed to them. They want a job, but not one that involves too much work. They want the government to come and save them from their own mistakes, to provide them with free healthcare and guarantee their cars will be sold. They want people who disagree with them to just go away and they want it all, now and for free.
Balboa knows that nothing is free, he knows that every minute that passes by is a minute he must take to get one more piece of food stored away for those long, cold winter days that are coming. He doesn’t realize that he could be working for naught and that his life could end in a flash of eagle’s talons or the blast of a hunter’s shotgun. He just knows that survival depends on getting the job done so he does it, day-in and day-out.
Things come too easy to most of us, even those of us who struggle from payday to payday. Even if you don’t have a job, chances are you aren’t as poor as the poor in other countries and you can get some aide from the government through one program or another. That’s good for those who really need it, but it’s only a temporary fix, and some use it as a crutch and just get dependent on it.
So maybe we should all make an effort to try to learn a little something from Balboa the Squirrel. We, as citizens and neighbors, could learn to be more industrious in our labors. (Like me with my much neglected garden) and our government could learn to be a bit more industrious in how they run things and stop giving away the store. There is, after all, always a winter coming sooner or later and we have to have something left to eat.
Maybe we should all be working to survive the long cold winter of our worsening economy and employment numbers, so that when spring comes we will emerge strong and full of mushrooms. So to speak.

Bigfoot Told Me the Aliens Have Proof

I am vacationing this week, so this is coming to you from Fort Carson in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, right next to North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD] and Cheyenne Mountain. So conspiracy theories are on my mind.

First off, let me just say that I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. Indeed, I love a story filled with intrigue and espionage with good guys and bad guys and every cliché spy gag that can be found. But I confine those enjoyments to my leisure time, and then I let Ian Fleming take me on a trip through the dark world of conspiracy. Sometimes I like my conspiracy fix through movies and I pop in No Way Out or Fahrenheit 9/11, but I always keep in mind that it is make-believe. Entertainment for those mindless times. If I want my brain stimulated, I turn to one of the many educational channels on cable. They regularly have conspiracy theory shows on. But again, I know it is for entertainment.

Now there is a certain segment of our civilization who will believe most anything and the tales of conspiracy flow through American culture like water. Everything from the grassy knoll in Dallas to our government being responsible for the attacks of 9/11 to the now infamous Dan Rather-Bush Document fiasco, have been latched on to by folks with way too much time on their hands.

In keeping with that tradition we now have the Birthers, led by Lou Dobbs of CNN, who obviously learned nothing from Rather's downfall.

Hey, I am sorry that many of the folks on the right side of politics are so unhappy that Obama won. Look, you should have ran somebody with a snowball's chance to beat the guy. I didn't want him to be president and I still believe in my heart that he does not possess the good judgment to do the job. Just look at his latest snafu in involving himself with the Gates arrest in Cambridge, Mass.

He is screwing up with his Afghanistan policy and is about to repeat the mistakes of the Soviet Union. I hate his foreign policy, I hate his domestic policy and I would not vote for his reelection if they ran Bozo the Clown against him (which given the Republicans' most recent candidate selections is a possibility).

But the truth is, he is an American, born in Hawaii. Yes his father was a legal alien from Kenya but his mother was American. That (his mother's nationality) in itself gives him birthright, if nothing else. I mean are you telling me that a child born in a foreign hospital, to say a diplomat's daughter or a vacationing mechanic's daughter, isn't an American and can't be president? If you are then you are wrong.

Obama was born in the U.S. It has been shown with documents from Hawaii and repeated official statements from the state as well. We just have some folks so caught up in the fact that he won the election that they can't let go of the anger and now it has manifested itself into the Birther Movement. I really wish they would stop because it's embarrassing to me, as an American, to hear foreign news services reporting on the crazy Americans who think their president isn't a citizen. Not only that, but you are wrong!

Looking at it from another point of view, ask yourself this question: Would the Democratic Party really be so collectively stupid as to not ensure that their candidate was eligible for the office? I mean really, would they? Regardless of what you think of individual Democrats, the people who run the party behind the scenes and cook up all the campaign strategies and so forth get paid to make sure things are right. With all their hatred of Bush and their conspiracy theory that he was an illegitimate president because of the 2000 election, do you really think they would risk something like running someone that is not eligible? It would be suicidal for the party. If you do you may just be more unstable than James Carville.

Like it or not, the man is president, the man won the election fair and square, just as Bush did in 2000, and the man is an American. If you want to fix that Birthers, drop the nutty conspiracy junk and start working on getting him replaced in 2012. Of course, if you believe the Mayan Calendar conspiracy, the world ends in December of 2012 so we don't have to deal with it for much longer anyway.

So what do you say, how about putting all this wasted energy into finding a good replacement for Obama and then we'll see what conspiracies pop up about the new guy or gal. Just please, please, by all things holy and right, don't run a loser again. Yes, I mean Sarah Palin. Because nobody likes a quitter.