For a couple of weeks my wife, my daughter, and I enjoyed watching a cardinal family build and tend a nest that was just a few feet from our kitchen window. My wife especially enjoyed watching the adult birds working together to raise their little family.
But yesterday the nest was destroyed and the hatchings presumably killed by our neighbor’s cat. The attack was particularly irritating because we had specifically asked our neighbors to keep the cat out of our yard while the cardinals were raising their chicks.
In our little town, cats are not actually permitted to run free. There is an ordinance prohibiting cats and dogs from being loose. Of course, this being America, Land of the Free, our neighbors scoffed at the mere suggestion that they should in any way modify their behavior, or their pets’ behavior, in consideration of other persons. In fact, when my wife asked them to keep the cat indoors – which they are required to do – they became hostile and insulting.
Of course, we see the same selfishness and lack of consideration almost every day when we walk Sammy, our purebred LBD (Little Brown Dog), in the park near our home. We cannot count the number of times we have been accosted by dogs running loose, even though the park has multiple signs explaining that dogs must be leashed. We’ve never been seriously attacked, but there have been a lot of anxious moments, for us as well as for Sammy.
Of course, it’s not just pet owners that place their own convenience above the interests of everybody else. You see it everywhere: neighbors refusing to support a school levy because “my kids are out of school now,” voters supporting efforts to take healthcare from millions of fellow Americans because ”why should I pay for someone else’s healthcare,” and so on. But this is not a new problem.
In 1919, in the months before his death, Theodore Roosevelt was planning to run for the presidency again. A central theme of his intended campaign was to “restore the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.”
May 27, 2018
Roosevelt quote from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2018.