#birds stupidpeople politicalthoughts

[thedivinemsem]

We have chicks.  I was pretty sure that the hawk eggs had hatched, but it was nice to see them for ourselves.  My walking buddy didn’t have her camera today, but I’m very sure she’ll be bringing it along tomorrow.

After more than a year walking the river, we pretty much know most of the morning regulars by sight, and a few we stop and have conversations with.  I know there’s a group that pulls invasive vines and picks up trash, and there’s a park worker who found Elmo on a bench and had him hanging from the back of his truck for a bit.  I found that a bit disturbing, to be honest.

Today we came across a middleaged couple taking a walk and the woman engaged us in conversation, asking why they couldn’t dredge the river bottom so that they could straighten out the bend in the river.  There’s a place where the paved path has collapsed and its marked off by barricades - eventually the plan is to build a bridge.  I told her that the other shore belonged to a different county so any work of that sort would likely be complicated....and that the river had been running this way for hundreds of years, and I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to mess with its flow.   She proceeded to explain to me about the path was ruined because of the power of the river and if it was straightened out, then the path would be fine....and she continued on with something about the entire area being flooded if not for the dams and some other things.

I noticed that both her companion and my walking buddy had moved pretty far ahead of us so I was kind of stuck in this conversation.  And although I disagreed with her, I really didn’t feel like debating - rather I just wanted to continue my walking and birdwatching.  But as my friend said later, it seemed like this was a woman who didn’t get to talk to people much, because she took the opportunity to segue into a lecture on COVID-19 and how it was manmade from the SARS virus  - in fact, its full name was SARS-COVID-19.  And how it was brought to DC through a plane that landed at Dulles Airport and they even knew the exact date and time it arrived.  And she’d be glad once “they” decided it had gone on long enough and let us stop wearing masks.

About this time we had made our way up to the hawks nest and I excused myself to take some pictures with my walking buddy. We said goodbye and she headed off to catch up with her own companion.

I tell this story because I am still surprised when I come across people who believe crazy theories - and have no problem repeating them as fact to strangers.  I mean, in the abstract I know that people send money to Nigerian scammers, and I have one or two online acquaintances whose hearts were broken by online fake profiles.  But its difficult for me to imagine anyone being so intellectually lazy as to simply parrot untruths they read online without bothering to do any research first.

I need to stop being surprised and start to be worried.....This is how the “Big Lie” has gotten so much traction that Congresswoman Cheney is about to lose her leadership position to a much less experienced woman whose main qualification is her devotion to our former president.  

I wish I could just relax and be grateful that we have a government now that recognizes repairing our own bridges and roads is more important that a big, beautiful, border wall - and that we need to encourage everyone to be vaccinated because COVID-19 is not “the flu” - and that government looks more like the America of today and less like a group of old rich white guys making decisions for the rest of us.

But then I’m reminded - there are plenty of gullible people out there and plenty of politicians/foreignpowers/scammers happy to take advantage of them.