The lost raccoon
Sometime last night, a beautiful raccoon lost its life in an unfortunate confrontation with a vehicle on Monarch’s main thoroughfare leading out of town. As I made my way to church this morning, I saw him lying in the middle of the street. He looked as if he were simply taking a nap and would soon return to a waiting spouse and several black-masked babies. My wife and I usually go to services together, but since my wife was ill this morning, I was alone and had no conversation with which to divert my thoughts from the sad sight I had just observed. So, my mind turned to thoughts about what “ought to be.”
After a night of raiding village bird feeders and leftovers from dog and cat food bowls, this masked bandit should have returned home for a day’s rest and relaxation with his family. In fact, he should have enjoyed several seasons of doing what raccoons love to do — climbing trees, fishing in nearby streams, and hunting in the forest. I was sad for him and the abandoned family I imagined to be worrying about his absence.
I regretted his misfortune even if he had been the sly little devil that always outsmarted me in my many attempts to protect the suet cakes I put out for the birds: the ones I always found half eaten or entirely missing in the morning.
In the scheme of things, raccoons may not be very important to most of us unless we have the time and inclination to hunt them or utilize their hides for such things as coonskin hats, etc.
But the older I get, the more I realize how precious life is, whether that life is a raccoon’s life or that of a human being. Loss of life is inevitable, of course, but in our society life has become disastrously cheap. Thirty Chicagoans were murdered in one night last week. I heard a newscaster say that over a thousand people have been killed in Chicago so far this year. While that was happening in Chicago, lives were being wasted all across our land in other cities. Each year thousands of lives are squandered through carelessness on the highways, and yes, a million lives are deliberately extinguished by abortion. We shake our heads in disbelief when we read of murderers like Hitler and Stalin, or serial killers, or mass killings in schools and we ask, “How can these things be?” Life has become cheap, dirt cheap.
The raccoon reminds us that even when we are careful, accidents happen; however, our society is full of harm intentionally perpetrated upon others. Why? Like a contagion, self-centeredness runs rampant throughout our culture. Way too often it is, “every man for himself.”
Life is precious, all life-not just my life. Ideas also are precious, but not just mine. We have become a nation divided in a thousand ways with everyone thinking only of his own pleasure, his own ideas, his possessions, indeed, only his life. How has this happened? It starts small, but grows big. Fifty years ago, a gentleman was expected to remove his hat in an elevator or at the table and when he spoke of himself with others, he always placed himself last. (Tom, Dick, Harry, and I). Now, it is, “Me, Bill and Jack …. ” Courtesy is respect for others. When we begin to put self before others, we launch a steady descent toward the chaos we see in today ‘s society — chaos in family life, business life, and governance.
“We have forgotten that Jesus taught us to love others as we love ourselves. All life is a gift from God and should be revered as should all gifts from God. Perhaps this is why President John Adams said, We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
(Second president of the United States, Speech to Massachusetts militia October 11, 1798)