Killers Stalk the Land on New Year's Eve

(Installment 8 of the autobiographical series, "Liters to the Black Bone.")

The weird thing about suburbia in rural areas is the bizarre disconnect from the suburban mind and the still existing ecology in the farmlands. Mindless acts of violence proliferate, the neighbor once shot the offspring of a mating pair of foxes that everyone hearted for beginning to eat rabbits and voles.

Farmer just shot the babies.

Upon request, he replied,"foxes eat rabbits."

Foxes moved away, as a consequence everyone's gardens are plagued by the unchecked population of rabbits. That sort of mindless violence is both stupid and evil in ways that calling people names or being gossipy in a small town are not.

This sort of behavior is everywhere in these parts where so many men who mistake knowing how to use a gun for knowing how to use the tool. Some people get it, I have a brother who knows how to keep his family's refrigerator stocked with duck, goose and turkey meat all year long.

Mindless aggression and a sort of ignorant evil proliferate here in narrow bands. Some towns or sections have it more than others.

There are behaviors passed down generationally. I caught a savage backyard beating as a young kid for declaring that I was not afraid. The object I was to be afraid of was a fellow classmate, the reason was in awe of his athleticism. The reasons and objects didn't and don't matter, though. It was the principle of the thing that I insisted upon. Ok, Adam's awesome at middle school athletics. Why are you afraid of him? That statement (and one or two more upon request later) at a VFW hall eventually led to a mob of peers corralling the two of us into a backyard and screaming at us to fight. We was all just a kid.

 I vaguely remember other stuff like getting a shotgun pulled on me and the stories of endemic child abuse in this region that my sister tells me about now that she is privy to such matters as a public teacher.

The twisted detail was that he only shot the babies, leaving the parent foxes with the tragedy. Why would someone just kill the baby foxes and leave the parents alive with the tragedy if the point was to stop them from all from eating rabbits?

In retrospect, I wonder what I would think if I had flexed back instead? I proved the principle, but principles practically don't matter outside the classroom. Talk, walk, then run.

The rural suburban lawn being another absurd pathology of scale against ecology, enforced by the crude banality of mowers and whackers.