How watching some deer got me thinking

Sam Smith – We live next to a Maine field that is periodically used by up to a dozen deer. Watching them and thinking about their lives has taught me something about my own: namely humans are the only animal species on earth that allows fellow creatures outside of their close environment to tell them what to do.

Name another species of over 300 million beings that permits a president and a congress to make major decisions for them. The absence of a good answer may help to explain why things aren’t working better these days.  Meanwhile, 30 million deer in North America have no idea or authority about what the deer in our field are up to.

Obviously, you get a different result depending on whether your president is, say, Roosevelt or Trump but this may be due in no small part to genetic differences in humans, as well as education and mental abilities. Some may be prepared to lead, others may only think of themselves when doing so.

Or consider the politics of your neighborhood compared to that you observe on MSNBC. Is simply having fewer people more like humans were designed to function?

The probability that we humans are not genetically prepared to deal with each other in such huge and complex systems is something we can’t cure but we can at least be more astute dealing with issues such why so many turn so easily to ethnic hate or consider their own views to be the sole determinant of decent behavior.

Lest you think this is just a problem that humans have always had, consider that America’s population has tripled in just the last century.

As we have gotten larger so have the institutions that determine not only our economy but our thinking as well. For example, the National Education Association notes that “Until the 1960s, it was common for American high school students to have three separate courses in civics and government. But civics offerings were slashed as the curriculum narrowed over the ensuing decades,”

And while multiculturalism has become an increasingly respectable school topic, it is often treated as more a problem to be handled than as an asset to be appreciated. I was blessed with what was then one of two high school courses in anthropology in the country and learned in ninth grade that the world was made of multiple and varied cultures, It strongly formed my view of the world, not as a moral matter but as reality.

Boosting civics and multiculturalism education not just to resolve problems but to teach how one’s own world can work better should become much more of a priority than it is. We can’t do away with the huge institutions, corporations and governments we have created, but we can still value the different, the small,  and the nearby. And understand that the more we rely on grander alternatives we lessen the human in. . . .Oops, those deer are out on the field again. Gotta go.