Political inactivism

I'm not at a march today.  Would that I were, but farm life is like that.

There's a lot in this world that can point me towards despair.  Around here, a trip to the grocery store can do it--as I walked through the parking lot yesterday, I looked at the bumper stickers showing the political views, and by extension, the moral values of my neighbors.  There was the all too common "ORY GUN" logo.  There were all the NRA logos.  There was the "Protected by Smith & Wesson." There were the braggarts with "Molon labe" and III%.  There were salutes to the second amendment.  There was one truck that had, instead of a stick-figure family, a similarly arranged collection of semiautomatic rifles and handguns.  There was another that had a silhouette of an AR-15 captioned "BLACK RIFLES MATTER."

The unifying morality behind all of these stickers and mottoes is that these people believe that their personal right to end your life (if they feel it necessary) supersedes your right to live.  Those last two stickers really betray moral depravity, and make it explicit that they believe that their right to own weapons designed to kill humans is equal to or greater than other people's right to exist.  I mean, how do you charitably interpret them?  The owners of these stickers didn't seem to be motivated by a desire to hunt--a legitimate use for a single-action rifle.  They certainly didn't seem to want to be involved in a "well-regulated militia" intended to be the defense of a free state.  It seems almost entirely about the right to own weapons designed to kill others, to hold capital power over one's fellow human.

The most common sticker around here, though, is one with the date of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College.  Roseburg is not a big town, and I am not well connected, but I am two degrees of separation from somebody who was there.  Most of the town is similarly connected.  There's no shortage of evidence that if we wanted to make events like the UCC shootings rarer, if we wanted to make murders rarer, if we wanted to make suicides rarer, we would do our utmost to purge our society of all firearms (I'd be fine with a concession for single action hunting rifles).  But we want to have our cake and eat it too.  We want to believe that we are the responsible gun owners; that we are the bulwark between freedom and tyranny; that we are the good guy with the gun who will save the day; that if we just keep doing what we've been doing, only harder, things will get better.  This is not a mature, adult attitude.  Until we grow up, things will get worse, and I despair.

But--I watched some videos of today's rallies across the country, in which young people asked the "adults" to grow up.  The refreshing thing about youth is that sometimes they haven't learned to look politely away from truth, and they haven't learned that they shouldn't respect stupidity in a suit.  It is stupid to suggest that the solution to gun violence is more guns, and they don't hesitate to point that out.  So, I look at the kids, making politicians squirm with impolite truth, making us uncomfortable while waiting for an answer, asking us, "why?"...and I have a little, little hope.

Monday Musical Offering, Spring edition

OK, a day late...

Kidding and lambing has started here at the farm, both scheduled and otherwise.  We have a kidding parlor, which took months of work (almost all by Duva's brother & his family), and which was actually ready within hours of the first kids being born.  The other five does scheduled for this weekend waited to pop until their appointed times.  It went fairly well--relatively little assistance was needed by the does, and of the 13 kids, only one didn't make it (which sucks, but it happens--their on-board systems just don't fire up, they lose body heat, which shuts down appetite, and so on.  We have saved some like this, with warm baths, tube feeding, vitamin shots, and so on, and we did all that and more for this little kid, but nobody bats 100% on these cases).  The score so far:

Boadicea--buck and doe
Opera--three bucks
Mocha--two does, one died
Zephyr--single buck
Karuna--single doe
Cavatina--two bucks, two does

The weather for the entire show was grand and glorious and springy.  The fact that the kidding parlor worked so well and that the deliveries were mostly textbook made me feel better.  This was the music running through my head--the first movement of Rachmaninov's symphony/cantata The Bells, based on a translation of Poe's poem.

(Performance by Kiril Kondrashin, Moscow Symphony Orchestra, RSFR chorus, soloists.  Meh sound quality but the performance is like burning magnesium.)

         Hear the sledges with the bells--
             Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
       How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
           In the icy air of night!
       While the stars that oversprinkle
       All the heavens, seem to twinkle
           With a crystalline delight;
         Keeping time, time, time,
         In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
    From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells--
  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Minimum day, the calm before the storm

The day before yesterday was one of the hinges of the year, where we turn from one segment of the farm calendar to another.  In the morning, I went up to the barn.  I gave the elderly sheep a scoop of senior equine feed.  To the does, I gave a feeder-full of orchard grass hay.  For the ewes, I only had to fluff up the orchard grass that was in their feeder, for they hadn't cleaned it up, and as soon as I opened the door they bolted out into the pasture.  I walked over to the bucks, filled up their feeder with orchard grass, and fluffed up the rams' feeder.  I then walked over to the junior bucks, topped off their feeder with orchard grass, walked over to the junior does and did the same for them, and I was done.

That was the morning feed.  The junior does and bucks had been getting supplementary grain and a little alfalfa, but they had outgrown their need for it.  The senior bucks are coming out of rut, and no longer need extra calories from grain.  The sheep are working the pastures down to nubbins before I spread seed, and are less interested in hay than they are in fresh grass.  Those animals had just finished tapering off their feed requirements.  Today, some of the animals are starting their increase--the first does are expected to kid in a week or less, so now they are getting a generous serving of alfalfa.  Things will get more complicated as we have kids to bottle feed, milking does to nourish,  and possibly a ewe or two with lambs--and that's not to mention the routine of milking.  But, for a couple of days there, feeding everybody, including the chooks, the cats, and the dog, took only twenty minutes.