The Ultimate Responsibility

I can answer that in a moment.  The care of children.

Now comes the difficult task of seeing where that leads us.  Of course the most important and enduring responsibility is to one’s own children.  You give them life when a sperm enters an ova, but for most people it is made real when a child is born.  From that moment, and for a long time to come, their body is their only possession.  For at least 15 years everything else is given to them.  The parents have given them life, but now a person is born who owns that body.  A real person different from any person before and due respect from day one.  And owed love and care.  “Owed” from the debt paid forward from our parents and grandparents.  It can never be paid back, only onward to the next generations.

Then comes the care of children in the family/clan/village/school where parents take turns looking after other children.  Then orphan children looked after by foster parents.  Even unknown children will be looked after.  Lose your little kid in a bustling Shanghai market, and I bet after 3 harrowing hours of searching you will find them being looked after by a stallholder, happy and fed.  Even animals look after kids.  I was driving about 70 dairy cattle through a muddy gateway to the dairy, a little kid fell off the fence into the gateway.  Before anyone could do a rescue, dozens of cows had daintily stepped over the child.   Plenty of mud , but not a hoof print on the kid.

The primary task of kids and teens is having fun and learning and the primary task of parents and grandparents is to look after them and nurture their body, brain and spirit.  It was ever thus and we are programmed that way to get our emotional rewards and satisfactions conforming to that pattern.  Otherwise would have meant the human race would have died out long ago, because no other animal invests such huge effort in rearing young.  No other animal is so helpless and dependent for so long in infancy.  If you were born a wildebeest, you would be expected to trek 20kms on your first day!

I think I have laboured the point about responsibility long enough so you are wondering where I am going.  So here it comes.  WTF can’t we realise that a huge part of that responsibility is to leave our children, our children’s children, and so on, a planet they can live on??  How did the disconnect between the powerful nurturing instincts, and the careless destruction of the planet occur??  I guess because emotions are immediate and rational considerations are not.  Sigh.  How to connect those dots?  You may guess from all the question marks, that I don’t have answers readily available.  It needs some clever thinking to harness what I feel for my kids and grandkids, into action so that we may pass on to them an environment so rich, so lush, so diverse and productive, as the environment we inherited.  It all seems so downhill at the moment where isolated examples of restoration are showcased while the mass destruction continues.

Which brings me to the desultory subject of the forthcoming elections.  I can’t see much point in voting for either of the major parties as they don’t adequately address future issues.  They protect established interests.  They look into the future and make sure it doesn’t happen.  You might think I would rush to support the greens.  A few strident comments, then they collapse back into the mainstream, hedging bets and courting the popular vote.  Can’t see any progress there.  I might not bother to vote and risk a token fine, though you can get out of that with almost any excuse short of a bad hair day.  I don’t think we can expect any real leadership from politicians on keeping the planet habitable, so you will have to do it yourself.  Seems obvious to me that if you care for your kids and grandkids, do it yourself by whatever means you have available.  Maybe we can shame the politicians into action, though the cynical side of me says we can’t, we can only show them where the votes are.

To show you how diligently I am looking after my 2 year old grandson when he is in my care when babysitting, I offer a few pics taken in the last few days to demonstrate my nurturing credentials.

Here he is playing with a possum and tweaking its ears and saying “ear” as no doubt his mother has done to him.  He did approach cautiously, and I did monitor the possum’s stress level.  Animals usually only attack humans out of fear, and this possum did not show any.  That rule of thumb does not apply to crocodiles.  Animals can be quite tolerant of infants.

Henry loves playing in my workshop.  There is so much junk in there and I don’t give him a hard time about making a mess, because it is such a tip already.  Shelves of junk and nails and tools, machines and a selection of 5 chainsaws such as he has seen his father use, piles of wood shavings to heap into bowls and buckets, racks of tools on the walls and boxes of sockets, sections for small bits of timber and pipes and springs, a veritable cornucopia of possibilities.  And a red-bellied black snake that has been living in there for months.  It is listed as the world’s 14th most deadly snake and quite common at Possum Valley.  Nine of the top ten deadliest snakes are Australian and found only a few kilometers away in the wet gum forests, but not here as I am told that the red-bellied black kills and eats it’s more venomous cousins.  Henry had already come across the black snake as I wandered out of the workshop a couple of weeks back to find him looking at a patch of grass at his feet.  As I walked up I saw the snake, it saw me and took off past Henry passing just a few centimeters away.  They are really docile and I have stood on them half a dozen times without mishap.  Not deliberately I wish to point out.

Anyway, that potential danger to Henry has been resolved as yesterday I found the snake dead in the middle of the workshop floor.  Just to be sure I lobed a bit of rubbish at it.  Still being cautious I got my snake tool (stick with wire loop) to pick it up.  I took it outside to photograph.  It looks as if it bit off more than it could chew.  Stone dead the both of them locked in a deadly embrace.  The snake reputed to kill the world’s deadliest, had met it’s match.  I suspect that it is a juvenile cane toad, itself poisonous, though in a passive form and concentrated on the back of the neck.  Ironic that two animals poisoned each other.  I have watched another fight to the death where a wasp and a spider battled it out as to who could strike the first blow.  It was a protracted battle, but the wasp won and carried off the paralyzed spider to be food for it’s brood.

I feel part of nature rather than above it.  I deal with it on a daily basis as it tries to plunder my food supply and establish a home in my nice dry house.  I defend my space, but realise that other life is trying to make a living too.  I hope Henry too will grow up feeling that.