The real and true news is the constant thing; all aberrations are false and misleading distractions. The "administration" at our university has been reminding us of this principle lately. But they too shall pass. Administrators come and go, while the faculty perseveres. While the most recent "current president" tries to leave his mark before moving on to his next higher-paying job, we work to see that he can read the writing on the wall.
That's a cryptic way of saying that the deer and the bobcats are the real thing. Mama Hale used to watch "As the World Turns," which was not about the "world" at all, but rather about the messed-up, foolish lives of humans, who just make trouble for themselves by forgetting the world entirely, the planet where all life lives.
It is constantly true that bachelor groups of male white-tailed deer in late summer are pent-up trouble waiting to burst into the open. And bobcats prowl in the daytime in addition to the nighttime. The photo above of the "headless" wildcat is the first one captured in the daylight in the three years of this trail camera. Why the camera waited until his head was out of the frame is something I hope to discover and correct.
Here's an editorial I wrote this morning and then posted in a couple of public forums:
"I am a guilty man. I have shamed myself, and I now vainly seek forgiveness.
"Last week when the circuit court approved a restraining order that compelled CMU’s Faculty Association members to return to our classrooms and prohibited us from picketing, to my shame, I obeyed.
"Forgive me. Not only did I know that my first obligation was to uphold the principle of liberty and my right as a plain citizen of this country to say what I please, but I have also encouraged my students for decades to believe that this basic right is worth protecting. I am a guilty hypocrit.
"I was roused from my dreams this morning haunted by Thoreau’s words: “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” I was advised by my leaders that I should accept this prohibition and just wait until the hearing took place on Friday. As I type this I am haunted by Martin Luther King’s response when he was told to “wait”: “I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed.’”
"Some will forgive me easily, generously saying that I over-react, that it wasn’t my fault that the freedom to talk openly about important issues had suddenly been outlawed in Mt. Pleasant, that I was an innocent victim of a time that was simply “out of joint.” Thank you—sincerely. But I can’t get Huck Finn’s example out of my haunted head. His time was out of joint, yet he—a fourteen-year-old boy—did the right thing. His time and his culture taught him that it was wrong and sinful to stand up for the rights of a man—his friend Jim, a runaway slave. Even this unschooled boy saw the true moral course through the obfuscations of his culture. At the height of his crisis, this boy had the courage to stand on the side of liberty and oppose the call to obedience: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
"Surely an American university should uphold our hard-earned liberties and not affiliate itself with the suppression of the long-honored freedoms of assembly and speech. This is America.
"My obedience last week was the most un-American activity I have ever commited.
"Please forgive me."
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