My bike isn’t a bike at all, actually a recumbent trike. It has three wheels, two in front and the drive wheel behind the seat. Still a long history with bicycles and I call everything that moves under pedal power a bike. My normal is to ride for an hour first thing in the morning, about 10 miles of flat, smooth streets in my neighborhood, never straying more than 5 blocks from my house. That makes me an authority on every crack, bump and undulation along the route. There is one short descent where I roll out for a couple of hundred feet followed by a climb where I have to gear down to regain the lost elevation. The work is probably more important now than ever before. Good cardiovascular exercise is critical to both my physical well being and a balanced psyche. After 9:00 a.m. my day turns pretty much sedentary. With pandemic forecast through the next year I don’t know what I’ll do come cold weather; maybe buy a stationary exercise bike.
I take breakfast after my ride on the patio if I’m cooking on the grill or cold cereal inside. Cereal isn’t tasty as eggs and sausage but I can watch the bird feeders from the kitchen window. Today my favorite customers were intimidated by starlings on the peanut feeder and four, young sibling squirrels. They have to work long and hard for a sunflower seed but they monopolize the feeder and keep the finches away. So I watch their tactics and theorize how I can squirrel-proof the feeder. I’ll be working on that later. Squirrels have a reputation, well deserved no less, for being clever if not shrewd. I don’t think so; relentless is a better word for their quest for food. They are rodents, tree rats with gnawing teeth that never stop growing. That’s why they can chew holes in metal bird feeders and seemingly indestructible obstacles. They don’t have anything better to do.
Starlings and squirrels are just trying to earn a living; I know that. They can’t help it that DNA only knows one tune. They are simply replicating links in a long chain; in that regard, not that different than humans. The fact that I like titmice and woodpeckers is about me and I lure them to my patio with their favorite food. But it also attracts critters that I didn’t invite. Extending privilege to some and not others doesn’t make me a racist when it applies to different species. Still it is what it is, my intentions are selective and exclusively targeted. I don’t wish starlings or squirrels harm, just stacking the cards so my favorites don’t have to work so hard. The others are on their own but enforcing my rules is impossible. Between people, the privilege paradigm discriminates against people we don’t identify with, it goes tribal in a heartbeat and you get racism, Nationalism or both.
Nature instills in us a preference to keep company and support of our own kind; not just other people, people who look and behave the same as us. But evolution has equipped us with a revolutionary tool, the cerebral cortex. Squirrels have them too but too small to draw comparisons. Our cortex allows us to be subjective, to correlate unrelated bits of information and make predictions. It’s like writing. If you have enough pages you can write a very long story with multiple plots and the human cerebral cortex has more pages than we can count. But often, most often, we default to the old, prehistoric, instinctive brain where fight & flight call the shots. In that mode we don’t care for nuance nor do we pause to weight the options. Privilege is hardwired into the old brain. That paleolithic legacy began with bonds between blood relatives and can extend to others in our tribe. Still we can override the reflex, embracing and rewarding strangers when it makes sense.
When I began this story I was making the segue from physical exercise to watching birds at the peanut feeder. Now I’m exercising the cerebral cortex, in the teacher-talk mode. But humans are addicted to a conscious preoccupation with self. As far as we know, we are unique among other mammals in that we think about what other people may be thinking. The fact that we think about thinking at all is testament to that cerebral cortex. I doubt any squirrel has ever pondered the significance of “Why?” Still, my big brain is tasked with making my sunflower seed feeder squirrel proof.
In the current state of pandemic I think a lot about what my countrymen are thinking about. All around me people are exploiting privilege, calling it “Liberty” as if it makes us immune to the virus. Americans are subdivided into artificial, ideological tribes where feeling good in the moment is preferable to addressing risky behavior and bad news looming on the horizon. This is day 100 and it feels like the first mile of a marathon.
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