I noticed right after I
moved to Fort Collins last summer that the sidewalk cleaners in my neighborhood
had something odd attached to their blowers: a dowel rod that extended about
six inches below the barrel, to which it was firmly fastened by duct tape. I couldn't figure it out. Finally I asked a cleaner. "It's to knock the goose poop off
the sidewalk, she said — when it doesn't blow off."
I was up on Canadian geese, the plague of golf
courses and parks and beaches.
They were a terrible problem in some of the Eastern cities I knew. The city of Ottawa, I'd read, was using
drone helicopters to chase them away.
One Western city had tried decoy coyotes, another had hired a crew of
border collies. You wouldn't
believe the innovative solutions to the problem — specially trained dogs,
special goose repellent, fake goose-in-distress calls, "lethal
control," water cannon, egg addling (oil on the shells), and "capture
and euthanasia using carbon dioxide." Can't you hear the pitches being made to city councils by
ambitious salesmen and pro-active city managers? Now here was Fort Collins handling its Canadian geese with a
method that would hardly have a chance in your ordinary American council or
boardroom: just live with them.
Sure they pooped on your sidewalk. Sure they waddled in front of your
car. Is that going to wreck your
life? Why not go to a little
trouble, like taping a dowel to your blower or stopping your car for a moment,
and get on with what you're doing?
With your mind at rest.
If sociologists had a reliable happiness meter I'm
willing to bet that it would show Fort Collins registering far better numbers
than those cities all bent out of shape over their Canadian geese. And if that's true then the reason, I
think, is that they've gotten ahold of a great, life-enhancing principle: live
with the shit that doesn't kill you.
At the moment, especially in France, many people in
Europe think Gypsies are shit.
They don't get jobs, they clutter the landscape, and they steal. Mon Dieu, how they steal. They hang around tourists like crows,
picking every badly closed pocket.
We need a bold program. How
about eviction from the country?
Well, that's one solution, but it's not the Fort
Collins solution. The Fort Collins
solution would be to tighten the thievery laws and enforce them strictly. Go after the objectionable behavior,
not the objectionable ethnicity.
In other words, get the shit off the sidewalk, the shit that bothers
you, and learn to live with the people that bother you. (I might point out that the Americans,
doing a fair job of integrating Gypsies into the work force, could be an
example here.) If part of that
learning to live together is avoiding offense then the poop-knocker is a
wonderful model: it knocks anybody's, any nationality's, any race's, any
species' poop off the sidewalk without respect to its origin. If geese were sensitive to slights
they'd have nothing to fasten on.
The Fort Collins principle is very useful in guiding
people away from cruelty to the sensitive. I remember that in some James Gould Cozzens novel or other
there was a congregation in New England demanding that their rector tell the
organist to quit practicing on the carillon at odd hours of the afternoon. It was such a jolt hearing this burst
of bells when you didn't expect it.
The rector's advice, as I remember, was pure Fort Collins: live with it
a little longer. The organist was
old, and thought the town was happy to hear his music any time. It would have hurt him deeply to think
he had been mistaken all these years.
So, just live with the man.
Bear the jolt.
What the Fort Collins people do is adjust our
perspective on the activist, the pro-activist,
the man with a plan, the guy who in an interview, or on the hustings, lights
everybody up and, in the job or office, is a new broom, sweeping clean. As president of a company he'll have
the stock up 70% in three years.
As President of the U. S. he'll have the nation back leading the world
in a year. He won't take any shit
from anybody. I think you can find
the same kind of action-promoter on the other side, leading the occupiers into
the administration building, posting the non-negotiable demands, waving the
shirt from the barricades.
Neither of those activists would be where they are
if somewhere along the line they hadn't made an impassioned speech, a pitch to
a board of directors, or a party convention, or a rally of the
disaffected. Everybody in
red-blooded America knows how the speech goes.
I can't help thinking of how the Fort Collins
competitor with those charismatic dynamos must have made his or her pitch for
election or employment. "I
propose to let well enough alone, to take up problems as they arise, and to
look first for the least radical solution. With problems I can't solve — and there are many — I will
draw on my special expertise: muddling along doing the least amount of
damage. I expect to live with some
inefficiency and sharp practice in my organization, as I expect the disaffected
in my constituency to live with some injustice and oppression. As they are all now living with some
goose poop."
It's the glory of this community that they elected
or hired such a person. And no, I
don't think that means that they are passively reconciled to the evils of the
world. I think it shows that they
have a sense of proportion, and can see what's worth spending their energy on,
their saved-up energy, and what's not.
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