U. S. Elections

by William H. Benson

November 3, 2016

     In the last century, U. S. voters have witnessed at least four lop-sided presidential elections.

     In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt destroyed Alf Landon, Kansas’s Republican governor. FDR received 523 electoral votes to Landon’s 8 votes. Only Maine and Vermont voted for Landon. Even Kansas failed to vote for Landon. FDR also received 62.46% of the popular vote to Landon’s 37.54%. By both measures, FDR won “the biggest landslide in U. S. history.”

     In 1964, Lyndon Johnson received 486 electoral votes, to Barry Goldwater’s 52. Johnson was from Texas, where he had earned the well-deserved nickname of “Landslide Lyndon,” for fixing and even rigging elections there, but he won the presidency in 1964 without fraud, and a minimum of gimmicks.

     On September 7, 1964, Johnson’s campaign televised a controversial ad. Viewers saw a three-year-old girl counting leaves on a daisy, until she gets to nine. Then, the camera zooms in upon her right eye, and viewers hear an announcer say “ten,” as if it is a countdown to a missile launch.

     Then, a mushroom cloud appears, and viewers hear LBJ’s voice, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

      The ad was designed to highlight Goldwater’s aggressive military position and his willingness to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, in Vietnam. Johnson’s campaign officials ran the ad that one time, but it swayed undecided voters to vote for Johnson, who then won 61.34% of the popular vote.

     Then, in 1972, Richard Nixon won 520 electoral votes to George McGovern’s 17. Only one state, Massachusetts, and also the District of Columbia, voted for McGovern. Even his native state of South Dakota rejected him and cast its 4 votes for Nixon, who won 61.79% of the popular vote.

     In November of 1972, few American voters knew how low Nixon’s campaign officials had sunk. Most likely Nixon did not know nor did he authorize the plumbers gang’s break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at Watergate, but once he learned of it, he authorized the “cover-up.” Less than two years later, he was forced to resign from the presidency or face certain impeachment.    

      Then, in 1984, the incumbent Ronald Reagan received 525 votes to Walter Mondale’s 13. Only Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, plus the District of Columbia, voted for him. When reporters asked Reagan what he wanted for Christmas, he joked, “Well, Minnesota would have been nice.” He won 59.17% of the popular vote.

     Runaways, lop-sided elections, and landslides, when 60% vote for a candidate, demonstrate that the American people have spoken and that democracy has worked. It is the razor-thin elections that cause people to wonder, “What do the American people want?”

     For example, in the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy “triumphed by the thinnest of margins.” He received 34,226,731 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,157, a difference of only 118,574 votes. JFK claimed 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, but only because Illinois and Texas had cast their votes for Kennedy.

     Right away accusations surfaced that Chicago’s autocratic mayor, Richard Daly, had stuffed the ballot box there to ensure a Kennedy win in Illinois, and that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate, had played similar tricks in Texas.

     Eisenhower urged Nixon to demand a recount in the two states, but Nixon instead “conceded defeat very early the morning after the election.” It is uncertain if a recount in the two states would have resulted in a win for Nixon. At a Christmas party, Nixon said, “we won, but they stole it from us.”

     In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote, 51,003,894 to George W. Bush’s 50,459,211, but Gore lost the electoral vote, 266 votes to Bush’s 271. This was the fourth time in U. S. history that the popular vote’s winner lost the electoral vote; this anomaly had occurred also in 1824, 1876, and 1888.

     The 2000 election hinged upon Florida. Bush needed 270 votes to win a majority, and he did so because he won Florida’s 25 votes, after the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 on December 12, to stop the recount there. It “ruled that the state of Florida’s court-ordered manual recount of vote ballots was unconstitutional,” because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment.

     Some candidates win or lose by a wide margin, others by a slight margin. Nixon did both. In 1960, he lost the closest race ever to Kennedy, but in 1972, Nixon crushed his opponent, George McGovern, and was re-elected to a second term. It was Nixon’s flawed judgement during that second campaign that led to his downfall. “Mistakes were made,” he said. It is wise to remember that the size of the win bears little relationship to the candidate’s performance once installed in the Oval Office.

Dualism

by William H. Benson

October 20, 2016

     Human beings see opposites. They divide the world, its citizens, and its ideas into just two camps. Instead of pointing to a series of gradations between two extremes, they tend to see only the extremes.

     They see good and evil, positive and negative, the truth and the lie, love and hate, men and women, heaven and hell, capitalism and communism, democracy and tyranny, war and peace, conservative and liberal, tragedy and comedy, disasters and blessings, innocent and guilty, Democrat and Republican, right and wrong, zeros and ones, black and white, Trump and Clinton.

     Philosophers call this division between two opposites “dualism.” According to the dictionary, dualism is the state of two parts, co-eternal binary opposites, two diverse ways of thinking, one set against the other.

     For example, Descartes struggled with the philosophical problem between mind and body. The mind, he argued, is distinguished from the body. Each is composed of different substances and display different attributes. The body is a physical presence, but without feelings or thoughts. The mind has no physical substance, but it is within the mind where ideas originate and feelings are felt. 

     Novelists use dualism to build their stories. First, they construct a protagonist, who represents the good, and then an antagonist, who represents the evil. As the antagonist moves behind the scenes, he beats up the protagonist. Then, in the novel’s final pages, the protagonist rises to the occasion, and subdues the antagonist. For a classic example, consider how Ian Fleming pitted James Bond against a most despicable series of enemies, including Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

     In a James Bond story the protagonist wins, but in history, the tyrant or the bully often wins.

     In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, he sees only two options after he learns that his uncle has murdered his father and then married his mother. He asks, “To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them: to die, to sleep no more.”

     Throughout the play he hesitates, unsure of which to choose, but then he decides “to take arms against a sea of troubles,” and rights them, but then he dies, as he had predicted.

     George Bernard Shaw took a swipe at teachers in his play Man and Superman, when one of his characters says, “He who can does; he who cannot teaches.” That is most ungenerous. Teachers work hard, and not everyone has the talent or patience to teach others a portion of all that he or she knows. Those who lack the talent or the patience find other things to do, rather than teach.

     This highlights dualism’s problem. It divides people into just two camps. Shaw split people between those who can demonstrate employable skills and those who cannot. I say that the work force needs all kinds, both skilled and unskilled.

     Woody Allen said, “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.” He also said, in his 1979 address to the graduates, “More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

     Taoism, China’s ancient philosophy, thought a little deeper about dualism. They constructed the yin and the yang, a circle that contains equal amounts of black and white, as a way to demonstrate the interrelatedness of all things. The yang represents the sun, masculine, positive, light, warm, dry, and forceful; but the yin represents shade, feminine, moon, negative, dark, cold, and passive.

     The yin and yang are contrary to each other, but they also complement each other, are interconnected, and interdependent in a natural world. The shadow cannot exist without the sunlight. We could not see the moon if the sun failed to shine upon its surface. On occasion, tragedy turns into comedy, and disasters can become our biggest blessings.

     It came as a surprise earlier this month when the Nobel committee awarded its prize for literature to Bob Dylan for the lyrics he wrote to accompany his music. For example, he wrote and sang, “Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Don’t stand in the door way, don’t block up the hall, for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. There’s the battle outside raging. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls. For the times they are a-changing.”

     The election is just days away. The campaign, unlike any other in modern history and disgraced by a raw and brutal dualism, will come to an end. This laborious process has now presented us a flawed choice between, what some might say, is “the horrible and the miserable.” Like Hamlet, we too have wondered aloud, “To be or not to be. That is the question.” And like Bob Dylan, we have concluded that “the times they are a-changing,” especially after we heard Donald Trump insult and threaten to lock up his political rival. I trust the American public has “the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Justice

by William H. Benson

October 6, 2016

     In the fall of 1838, Georgetown University in Washington D.C., was the preeminent Catholic and Jesuit university in America, but it had fallen on hard financial times. Its president then, Thomas Mulledy, decided to sell the slaves who worked the Maryland plantations that Georgetown owned. Several school officials disagreed with Mulledy’s decision, because he could have sold the land. Instead, he sold the workers who worked the land.

     When the slaves—272 men, women, and children—heard the sad news that a sale was imminent and that their new owners would transport them by ship to New Orleans, fear and panic gripped them. Some ran away. Others hoped for the best, but the sale was completed. Families were ripped apart. Mothers never saw their children again. The school received “$115,000, or the equivalent of $3.3 million today,” and with it, Mulledy paid down the school’s debts.

     Two weeks ago, officials at Georgetown University announced that the university would issue an apology “for its historical role in the slave trade.” In addition, officials removed two men’s names from their buildings, including Thomas F. Mulledy’s, and also announced that they would recruit students who were descended from those transported to New Orleans.

     Justice moves slow in this world; in this case it required 178 years.

     Bryan Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative, announced that his organization will build a memorial dedicated to the 4075 black individuals he has identified who were lynched in the Southern states between 1877 and 1950. It will open next year in Montgomery, Alabama.

     “I don’t think we can afford to continue pretending that these aren’t really troubling chapters in our history,” Stevenson said. “I think we’ve got to deal with it.” Stevenson also said, “The moral arc is long, but it bends toward justice. Instead of lynchings, we now have police shootings.” That is a point worth considering in light of the 991 citizens who police shot in 2015, and the 719 shot so far this year.

     Last week, on September 24, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on the National Mall in Washington D. C., in the shadow of the Washington Monument, the former dedicated to the slave, the latter to a slave-owner. President Obama was there, and said, “This national museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who we are. This museum can help us to talk to each other, and to listen to each other, and to see each other.”

     A federal appeals court judge named Alex Kozinski recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “our legal system has convicted hundreds of thousands of people of crimes based on ‘voodoo science.’”

     To support that statement he points to a report that the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued. It “concluded that most forensic-evidence—including fingerprint, bite-mark, firearm, footwear, and hair analysis techniques—have high error rates,” and that much of this evidence is “rank guesswork.” “Bite-mark analysis,” he says, “turns out to be totally unreliable.”

     One wonders how many convicted of crimes based upon “voodoo science” are sitting in prison now. How many were executed? Brian Stevenson said, “We treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent, and so we base justice more on wealth than on culpability.”

     Legislatures pass laws, presidents sign them, and they then appear in the law books for courts to interpret. Those laws are civilized societies’ attempt to spread equitable treatment upon all its citizens.

2001. S. citizens saw law-making in action recently. On Friday, September 23, President Obama vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would permit the families and survivors of 9/11 to sue Saudi Arabia for damages for that country’s “role in the terror attack in 2001.” Obama justified his veto because, he argued, it “would infringe on the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy.”

     The House thought otherwise and on the following Wednesday voted 348-77, enough for the 2/3’s necessary to override the President’s veto, and the Senate voted the same way, 97-1. The Act is now law. In his eight years in the Oval Office, Obama has vetoed 11 bills, but this is the first override. After fifteen years, those who lost family members on 9/11 may now sue for compensation for their loss.

     Two questions arise. Can society build a better model to achieve justice than the one we have now? Should the system of punishment for crimes committed be harsh or lenient? These are difficult questions to answer, and the solutions are not obvious. Thinkers have argued and wrestled with those two questions for millennium. I say that the Pledge of Allegiance says it best. “And justice for all.”    

     The Romans named their goddess for justice, Justitia, who held in one hand a sword, and in the other the scales that weighed the evidence and circumstances to determine guilt or innocence. Often sculptors or artists will blindfold the goddess, but not all do. One wonders if Justitia should see or not see.

Maxims

by William H. Benson

September 22, 2016

     In James Michener’s book, The Source, he created a fictional character who made a pest of himself among both friends and enemies by walking around ancient Israel and repeating a series of shop-worn proverbs that he had stockpiled over the years. For example, when he would meet a person with a problem, he would quote a more or less fitting proverb. Not everyone appreciated his tactic.

     The truth is: for eons men and women have loved their proverbs. Even today, most authors will include a catchy saying at their books’ beginning, often a quote from someone well-known, in the hope that the quote will capture the book’s essence.

     The thesaurus lists a number of synonyms for the proverb: adage, aphorism, axiom maxim, dictum, saying, motto, byword, principle, law, conclusion, rule, epigram, slogan, bromide, cliché, platitude, saw, or chestnut. Although there are distinctions of difference, they all mean the same thing.

     The most quoted English writer is, of course, William Shakespeare: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” “All the world’s a stage,” “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” and “two-star crossed lovers.” The Irish writer, Frank McCourt, said that when first exposed to Shakespeare, when a mere boy, sick in the hospital, he said that the playwright’s words, “were like jewels in his mouth.”

     Benjamin Franklin achieved fame and fortune in colonial Pennsylvania with “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” In each issue he included a list of axioms: “Fish and visitors stink in three days;” “Lost time is never found again;” “Speak little, do much;” and “Clean your finger before you point at my spot.” Throughout the colonies people read Franklin’s succinct words and appreciated his wit and wisdom.

     The most quoted American writer is, of course, Mark Twain. His definition of a classic: “One of those books that everybody says we should read, but nobody does.” “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” “Get your facts first. Then, you can distort them as you please.” 

     In Mark Twain’s fictional story, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer’s Sunday School teacher insisted that he memorize Bible verses, and if he did, he would receive a yellow or red or blue ticket. He failed to memorize even a single verse, but through shrewd negotiations, he exchanged his marbles and “a piece of lickrish and a fish hook,” for the other boys’ tickets.

     He ended with “nine yellow tickets, nine red tickets, and ten blue ones,” proof that he had memorized two thousand verses, but when the Sunday School superintendent asked him to repeat a verse about the disciples, he answered, “David and Goliath.”

     One quote falsely attributed to Mark Twain is the following. “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant, that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man’s intelligence had improved in seven years.” He could not have said that because Samuel Clemens’s father died when the lad was only eleven years old.

     Another of Twain’s quotes he did say, but then a reporter transformed it into a humorous retort, even though Twain did not intend that meaning. He is purported to have said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

     The truth is that a London reporter heard that someone with the last name Clemens was gravely ill, living in London, and may have died. The reporter quizzed Mark Twain about his health. Twain jotted a note to the reporter, and explained that it was his cousin James Ross Clemens, who “was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

     These examples of Twain’s demonstrate two difficulties associated with the proverb: that someone could not have said it, or that its meaning was converted into something the author never intended.

     Another difficulty is that the saying serves as a blanket that covers all times, circumstances, and people; or that it may hide a hidden agenda. For example, if someone says, “If you are not growing, you are dying.” This, I say, is manipulation. The speaker wants you to adopt their plan, their idea, and to jump on their bandwagon, when a better option may be “not growing.” “Fool rush in where angels fear to tread,” wrote Alexander Pope.

     Woodrow Wilson said that World War I, was “the war to end all wars,” and that America was going to war “to make the world safe for democracy.” Neither bromide proved true. The Great War in Europe exceeded all other wars in terms of death and destruction and was a prelude to World War II.

     Donald Trump wants to “make America great again.” As far as I know and can see, America has never ceased even one day being great. A quickly coined phrase may or may not be true. Judge its merit, consider its source, and balance its import with your own past experiences. Think it through.

     I end with two favorite quotes. The author of the first is unknown. “The bitterness of poor quality is long remembered after the sweetness of low price has been forgotten.” Then, Groucho Marx said, “I refuse to belong to a club, association, fraternal organization, church, or synagogue that would be so foolish as to have me for a member.”

Immigration

by William H. Benson

September 8, 2016

     Japan has a sizable population but a small land mass. About 127 million people live on just 377,930 km². Among the world’s countries, its population ranks 11^th, but its geographical area ranks 61^st.

     Canada is the reverse. It has a small population, but a large land mass. Just 36.5 million people live on nearly 10 million km². Its population ranks 38^th, but its geographical area ranks second, just behind Russia’s colossal 17 million km². Canada could absorb a much larger population.

     For decades, and even centuries, Japan has discouraged immigration, and today “the people pride themselves on their homogeneity.” One writer said that the Japanese people have “reflexively blamed foreigners for all social ills,” and that “discrimination is still rife.” In a derogatory tone, they label foreigners as “gaijin,” meaning an “outside person.”

     The Japanese fear an invasion of foreigners. They do not want terrorists. They do not want to see burkinis on their beaches. They want Japan for the Japanese. One writer, Tatsuya Mizuno, said that even “Brazilians of Japanese origin, who were encouraged to migrate to Japan in the 1980’s, have never really been accepted, despite their Japanese ethnicity.”

     The need for immigration into Japan though is paramount. Today, Japan’s companies have trouble hiring sufficient numbers of skilled workers. A substantial number of working-age people are set to retire in the next few decades, and a writer for The Economist magazine predicted that Japan’s population will shrink to less than 100 million people by the year 2060.

     Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, recognizes the worsening demographics but has hesitated to throw open his countries’ doors. His government though “has quietly eased Japan’s near-ban on visas for low-skilled workers.” In Tokyo now, visitors can see people from Korea, China, India, Vietnam, and Thailand, but, “Only tiny numbers of foreigners ever become Japanese citizens.”

     The opposite has happened in Canada. Forty-five years ago, on October 8, 1971, Canada’s prime minister then, Pierre Trudeau, and the father of the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, introduced legislation that threw out the old race-based immigration rules, and introduced a color-blind policy that instead emphasized language, experience, and education. He opened Canada’s doors, and no prime minister since has dared to shut them.

     As a result, Canada is now the one of the most multi-cultural countries in the world. Each year Canada welcomes about 250,000 people. In June 2000, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said, “Canada has become a post-national, multicultural society. It contains the globe within its borders. . . . Canadians are, by virtue of history and necessity, open to the world.” On immigration, Canada has triumphed.

     A Canadian journalist, Jonathan Tepperman, recently said on a TED talk that “Canada has four times France’s immigration rate, and that in 2015, Canada took in ten times the number of Syrian refugees that the United States did.”

     On Wednesday, August 31, the Republican contender for the Oval Office, Donald Trump, flew—not north to Canada—but south to Mexico. There he met Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who declared to Trump that “Mexican nationals in the United States are honest people, good people. Mexicans deserve respect.” As for who pays for the wall, Trump said, “we didn’t discuss that.”

     If he had dared to look outside, he would have seen a Mexican citizen, a lady, holding up a sign that read, “¡Fuera! ¡Fuera! Donald Trump Racista. Xenofobo. Anitmexicano.”

     To appeal to voters, Trump has softened his hardline campaign promise on the deportation of the 11.5 million undocumented workers in the United States. Most citizens are “appalled by the prospect of ‘federal agents breaking up families’ and shipping millions of people across the border.”

     Yet, Trump’s newest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, summarized Trump’s current policy, “No amnesty. No legalization. No sanctuary cities. The people who have committed a crime are gone.” A reporter at The Baltimore Sun summed up Trump’s wavering, “Rarely has a presidential candidate flip-flopped on an issue as throughly as Trump has done on illegal immigration.”

     One wonders which country approaches immigration right? A closed Japan, an open Canada, an open United States that now threatens to deport its illegals, or a country like Mexico, or even Syria, that has exported millions of its own citizens? The answer depends first upon geography: whether the land mass offers a temperate climate, sufficient rainfall, fertile soil, and adequate minerals, timber, flora, and fauna. It also depends upon the population’s size, skills, work habits, and education.

     Governing officials seek to balance their country’s geography with its population. What is right for one country may not work for another. Still, ambitious and energetic people will by instinct migrate to the country that offers them the best opportunity, and for the last four centuries that has been the United States. Warren Buffet says, “The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.”       

Great Plains Wildlife

by William H. Benson

August 25, 2016

     Vacation this summer took me to southeast Alaska, where I met the zoologist Brent Nixon. Each of his high-energy hour-long lectures on Alaska’s wildlife packed the theater and thrilled his audiences. Those who attended learned a host of details on the Great Humpback whales, the North American black and brown bears, seals, sea lions, Orca or the killer whales, and coastal bald eagles.

     His lectures prompted me to think about our wildlife here on the Great Plains, in the center of North America, how it pales in comparison to Alaska’s, and how it has changed.

     As little as two hundred years ago, enormous herds of the American Bison or buffalo roamed across the plains, and lesser numbers of elk and wolves. Then, late in the nineteenth century, large numbers of people came here to farm, raise livestock, and build homes and towns, and they converted the plains into a slaughterhouse. As a result, today on the plains, the few buffalo remaining are relegated to ranches, penned in by barbed wire, but the elk and the wolves have disappeared.

     Further back in time, into the last Ice Age, between 70,000 and 10,000 years ago, large mammals lived here on the Great Plains, including saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, mastodons, mammoths, and giant bears. Scholars are unsure what factors brought about their extinction, but they too have disappeared.

     What is left today? When we drive between towns, most likely we will see Pronghorn antelopes, deer, prairie dogs, coyotes, hawks, or eagles. If we get out of our car or pickup, we may catch sight of a fox, a cottontail rabbit, a jack rabbit, a pheasant, a badger, a raccoon, or a snake.

     Through licenses and designated seasons, state and federal officials limit the hunting and fishing of certain species, but for others, especially coyotes, prairie dogs, and rattle snakes, it is open season, meaning no limits and by any means.

     Dan Flores, a historian, who now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, published this year a book he entitled, Coyote America. In it, he calls the effort to eradicate the coyote [aka prairie wolf] “the most epic campaign of persecution against any animal in North American history.” He writes, that they are “victims of a crusade that surpassed any other in terms of the range of killing techniques and cruelty.”

     In 1931, Congress approved a spending bill that appropriated $10 million for the purchase of strychnine, and blanket poisoning killed off millions. Flores says that “between 1947 and 1956, approximately 6.5 million coyotes were exterminated in the American West.” And the killing has not stopped. He estimates that “500,000 are killed every year.”

     And yet, despite the strychnine, the steel traps, and the guns, the coyote has flourished. Unlike the buffalo, the elk, and the wolf, the coyote has increased its numbers and its range. For eons, coyotes were creatures who inhabited the plains and deserts, but in recent decades they have crossed the Mississippi River and taken up residence in the midwestern states, along the Atlantic seaboard, and even in cities. They arrived in Denver in the 1970s, and in New York City’s Central Park in 1999.

     Coyotes now live all across North America. Flores writes, “by the late 1970s, they had colonized all of North America—they even swam cold Atlantic waters to Cape Cod. Unless they stowaway to Hawaii, they colonized their final U. S. state, Delaware, in 2010.”

    How did the coyote survive a scorched-earth campaign? Flores points to their “reliance on problem-solving intelligence for success,” their excellent sense of smell and sight, their nocturnal behavior, their ability to deliver large litters of pups, and their willingness to seek new territory and to eat anything.

     Flores also underscored the coyotes’ social adaptive skill-set, which he labeled “fusion-fission.” Like wolves, coyotes will join together into packs, but unlike wolves, the coyote will separate from the pack and live alone. The “lone wolf” does not exist, but the “lone coyote” does.

     Coyotes will eat prairie dogs, a good thing. Although prairie dogs belong to the squirrel family, they choose to burrow into the ground and build tunnels. It is the excess dirt that they kick out of the tunnel at the surface that causes a pasture’s immense damage. Ranchers stare in disgust at the destroyed grass, and the devastated pasture. Hunters shoot them, ranchers poison them, but the prairie dogs still flourish.

     It has been said that “the female prairie dog is born pregnant.” That is not quite true. A full year passes before they reach sexual maturity, and they produce only a single litter each year.  

     For decades people have labelled the prairie dogs and the prairie wolves the Great Plains’s worst predators. One has to admire their tenacity to live and thrive despite an oppressive, determined, and intelligent enemy who hates them just for existing, for what they are.

     Flores predicted, “When the world ends, only cockroaches, rats, and coyotes will remain.” To that short list I would add five more: ants, bacteria, flies, mosquitoes, and prairie dogs.