#24: squirrels

I would like to take this opportunity to affirm my fellow Ouachitonians. Overall, I would say that we are a pretty reputable bunch. We serve the community in many ways: chillin' with the elderly, taking internationals to walmart, pickin' up trash once a semester on Pine St., and making Arkadelphia at least 400% hipper just by gracing it with our v-necked presence. We have passion. We have com-passion. We have compassion children. We eat. We pray. We love.

However, there is a group in our midst for whom I feel we have not reached the level of brokenness that is due.

Daily they wander around our campus unnoticed and unloved. All they ask for is a safe place to hunt, gather, and raise their kids. Usually, they are pretty inconspicuous. If you're especially astute and an early riser, you might just might spot one scurrying--naked and cold--through the grass, nervously, desperately, searching for something, anything, to take back to his family for sustenance. And oh to be a fly on the bark at night, when anguished fathers and mothers whisper of the coming winter, when there may be no walnuts on the table for dinner and no acorns in the children's stockings at Christmas.

Sure, they may not be as cool as the rest of us. Maybe those coats they usually sport look just like the one's their ancestors were rockin' back in '85 BC, but does mean they don't deserve our respect? Does it mean they don't still need acceptance?

Ouachitonians, we are called to care about the "least of these." I just don't think we have even begun to understand what this means when it comes to the furry ones among us. Our responses to them may vary. Some of us choose apathy. Others choose ignorance, pretending not to notice
when we see a furry brother crawling out of the trashcan with a chic fillet wrapper in his paws. Others are even downright cruel, making them objects of pranks and "relocating" them to new homes down at Degray. Did they ask for that? What have they done to merit such unjust treatment?

As much as I want to keep patting you on the back, friends, I just can't with the situation at hand. Something has got to give. Love, diversity, tolerance, antidiscrimination. These are not just words we throw around in ethics class. Whatever happened to personal application? What happen to faith+deeds? I have a dream, my friends, a dream that one day this tiger nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all (ver)-men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the gray side-walks of Ouachita, the sons of former squirrels and the sons of former squirrel hunters will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Arkansas, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, sweltering with the heat of 90% humidity 9 months out of the year, sweltering with the heat of mediocre dormitory temperature control, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children (yes I do indeed have four of them just in case you didn't know but I have to keep it on the DL since I'm pretty sure Francis Crawford rooms are only supposed to house two so they all secretly sleep on pallets under my bed and only leave at odd hours of the day when no reslife staff members are around...let's just say I have a past) will one day live in a tiger nation where they will not judge others by the color of their skin and/or fur but by the content of their character.