Of Baby Bunnies and Human Babies

Of Baby Bunnies and Human Babies

Lately, walking my dog down a neighborhood alley means we send young bunnies hopping for cover. Five or six of these cute little fur balls will keep us company on our daily walk. But this bunny richness won’t last. In a couple of weeks, my dog and I will stop seeing them. Where they go I can’t be sure.

Also a resident in our neighborhood is a beautiful red-tailed hawk. I hear his ice-water cry as he sweeps overhead. One morning, about five a.m., I woke early and happened to look out my second-story bedroom window. I watched the hawk swoop to a landing in my backyard. A second later a starling dive-bombed the hawk’s head but quickly flapped out of reach when the hawk slashed the air with a razor curved beak. With the starling gone, the hawk more lazily swiveled his head back and forth to take in his surroundings. Satisfied he was no longer pursued, he turned his attention to the talons on his right foot. Only then did I see that the hawk gripped the broken body of a baby starling. With great finesse, but why I cannot know, the hawk transferred the dead bird to his other foot’s claws, gave one more look around, and flapped up from the ground into the morning sky.

Maybe the hawk is helping the baby bunnies disappear.

Rabbits have litters several times every year. Disease, starvation, extremes of temperature and predators whittle down the baby bunny numbers so that I see them briefly when they are juvenile and less adept at staying out of sight. Then I stop seeing them—for reasons I can only guess at.

And I am worrying about whether to have one child.

I keep thinking about how many years the U.S. has been at war in the last few decades. I know there was a four year period from 1991 to 1995, in between the Persian Gulf War and the so-called conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, when U.S. soldiers weren’t fighting and dying somewhere overseas. They’re fighting and dying this year.

If I had a baby boy, would the U.S. be at peace, finally, by the time he turned eighteen? Will the nation still be draft-free? If I have a boy child, will he develop a sense of identity different than mine by joining the military—something his pacifist mom would never understand?

Has war become a kind of hawk, the perennial predator of humans?

While the mainstream media portrayed the genocide in Rawanda as the conflict between warring tribes, other analysts argue the tribes collided so savagely because over-population and land shortages made their lives desperate. www.jamiiforums.com/.../150692-causes-of-rwanda-genoc...

I do not want to bring a child into a world where war and violence exist because we cannot voluntarily limit the earth’s human population. Birth control seems far gentler than genocide.

The eastern seaboard of the United States is—has been for some time—one long city. Its name changes as it sweeps down the coast, but humanity is packed along that edge of the Atlantic in a way the folks who met the Mayflower could never have predicted.

Yes, I know some northern cities, devastated by corporations who moved their operations overseas, are struggling with abandoned buildings and growing stretches of unoccupied land. For those who remain, their desperation is of a different sort, an economic sort. http://detroit.about.com/b/2008/04/02/detroits-abandoned-and-vacant-buildings.htm

Yet the hunger for this child remains, in spite of all I see and hear.