Courage and the Christmas Chicken

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Courage and the Christmas Chicken

By JARID MANOS

Well my ass is mostly healed. Uninsured, unlicensed Texas pickup driver ran through a stop sign at 50 mph; crushed me. I’ve been injured many times before but, damn, along with not being able to breathe, for a while there it took me 20 minutes to get up from a sitting position. Another kind of prison. I’ve always relied on my body. No matter what, it always excelled, bouncing right back.

So it’s Christmastime again in Como. Each New Year’s Eve in ’hoods and barrios and reservations across America, we find out how armed to the teeth our neighbors are. As the year’s last witching hour approaches, non-shooting Como residents lie on the floor below window level, or leave. Gunshots get louder and more frenzied, a collective exclamation of anarchy, rebellion, self-inertia, no job opps, lives wasting.

The little black puppy down the street grew up on the chain and is now a full-grown dog. He’s finally lost his mind back there by the overgrown alley, his personality worn through like the mud arc he’s made in the yard. Anything sets the Lab to barking — a fluttering leaf, the bark of another distant dog, his imagination, a plane overhead that he tries to chase, head thrown back, until slamming to the end of his chain. But it’s the Como chicken that gets him the most. This runt-sized, brown-and-white mottled, mutt-looking hen can fly anywhere she wants, but each dawn she stalks him, neck jerking, stopping just outside his reach to turn her head sideways and stare, brown eye wide. He goes crazy; she keeps him company. It’s really only the two of them back there. She’s abandoned — he’s, well, kept like a slave by the descendants of slaves. Frosts on North Texas winter nights calm both of them down. She goes high into the bare, prairie-wind whispering branches, to avoid the cats. He collapses into the shed for a few, before something else sets him barking crazy again.

When I finally took the time to go to SorryEverybody.com, the web site was getting millions of hits a day. Even my hardened, numb ass was struck by the thousands and thousands of people posting images from every corner of America and every age and walk of life, holding up a simple, hand-scrawled post-election message to the world. Clicking on faces from Maine to Kentucky to Oklahoma to Texas to Idaho to California, interspersed with global responses from Korea to Europe to Brasil to Africa, I became mesmerized. In those silent faces I saw grief and worry, yes, for the damage that’s been done, is still to come, but this was beyond politics. I saw that our 1990s vision of a new millennial global community hasn’t been crushed.

Dr. Lewis Thomas, award-winning author of The Lives of a Cell, said last century before his death, “Just get out of this century and into the next. Then watch what we can do.” On so many fronts, many acknowledge that our civilization is heading 90 mph at a brick wall. I talk with activists all over the world. It’s still a young century, a very young millennium. We don’t have a lot of time, but maybe … maybe … .

Out here, even in the reddest state, there’s a welling sense of shoulders, our shoulders, heaved up against the door that’s being closed on us. That door is hope and the future. There’s just a crack left open; we can see the yellow sunlight streaming around the edge, though we can’t yet get it on our faces. On the other side are thousands of years of decency, wellness, fairness, intellectual and spiritual maturity, and global community, swathed in a living, breathing environment that nourishes all life on Earth. We grunt and push against that closing door.

I left last year’s single strand of green Christmas lights hanging in the front-yard mesquite tree, unplugged, forgotten. Though my block is again lit up with Christmas lights (lots of white this year — sort of nice; to me the old tradition marks the Solstice, the returning of the light), my place remains dark. As I write this, the dog has quieted, the half moon is making the midnight blue, a few dessicated leaves rattle on the mesquite. A wind is picking up.

None of us has to feel less for being who we are, for caring about the Earth, for working to bring people together rather than tearing them apart. None of us has to feel a chain around our necks. If we do, it’s our own acceptance of that.

Night winds shifting to the south, pushing the north cold back. Warm Texas winds blowing up across 400 miles of prairie left for dead. I know the wilderness in that wind. It’s good to live in Texas. Red … blue … the Como chicken has no idea. It’s good to be able to write again.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.