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Birds of a Feather



                                                                                                              Photo courtesy of the author

               We have a robin problem, or rather a paranoid robin problem. For some reason the previous owners of our home placed small speakers on either side of the detached garage. If you saw how close the homes are in our neighborhood, you’d wonder if they hated their neighbors. While we never used the stereo system, we didn’t bother to remove the speakers either.
About a month ago, a robin began making nests on top of each speaker. They’re slightly taller than I am, and, coupled with the end of the semester, I managed to not notice them. My husband spotted them, pointed them out to me, and stated he hoped the robin wasn’t planning on having her chicks here. I told him I wasn’t planning on moving the nests. We didn’t use the speakers anyway, and I didn’t want to piss off the bird.
She did in fact lay her eggs, and began getting loud whenever we were near the garage door. Soon we saw little beaks rising out of the nest, and then the Mama Robin’s volume increased. We managed to cope until last week when flight training began. Instead of squawking a loud warning signal at us, she attacked my husband as if it were a scene out of Hitchcock. We then started walking around to get to and from the garage after that.
I raise this sign of spring awakening not to talk about nature, but about paranoia. Until the Mama Robin attacked my husband, we were content to leave her and her young ones be, and even continued to fill the birdseed almost daily. You would think this would count, but it didn’t.  Her fear that we might harm her babies was too strong to allow her to let us share the backyard or even exist in her world.
Scott Pruitt of the EPA seems to share many qualities of this extreme form of paranoia. Last week, Terry Gross had on her show the New York Times reporter Eric Lipton, who’d recently published a story after gaining access to thousands of Pruitt’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. It’s clear to me that Pruitt sees all his plans for the EPA, and ultimately the United States, as his babies, and is so fearful of what we the public might do if we got near them, or even knew of their existence, that he’s had to surround himself with extremely expensive modes of protection. He’s not squawking at people, instead afraid they may attack him, causing him to fly first class for fear of interacting with the general public (that probably even includes people who helped elect his boss). Town hall meetings only happen if the crowds, including journalists, are pre-selected, “friendly,” and only ask pre-written questions.
As ludicrous as the soundproof booth in his office (at the cost of $43,000 in tax payer’s money), he also tried to get a bulletproof desk. With the twenty-member security tax force surrounding him, if someone still gets by them, the bulletproof desk probably isn’t going to save you. Clearly he’s mistaken his world for some Hollywood action movie.
Unlike our robin, most people like me (far left) had no interest in getting along with Pruitt, but probably aren’t planning anything as extreme as his paranoid mind has envisioned. Apparently all the so-called threats that have been investigated against him have just been Americans upset and utilizing their First Amendment right, rather than any potential interest in violence.
I keep wondering where that paranoia comes from. Yes, he wants to role back all the good (at least what many of us believe is good) things this country has done for the environment, and in essence each other, but does he really think the left are all whack-jobs who want to take him out?
Perhaps what’s actually happening in his troubled mind is his knowledge of his own people (think Charlottesville) and what they’re capable of, so he reasons we may be just like them. I want him out of the EPA, but not like that (please, no martyrs, not with these vile people). Maybe Trump will read in the “fake news” that Pruitt wanted the sirens on in his car as he traveled from his office to the fancy French restaurant and to be called "the Honorable," clearly believing he deserved presidential treatment too. The one thing I think we’ve all come to realize in this past year is that there’s only room for one person’s inflated ego in Washington.
Maybe Pruitt does have some reason for paranoia after all. Just keep him out of my backyard.

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