Admit Our Mistakes and Prepare for Houseguests

Here's what gets me.

We never seem to learn from our mistakes and always act like we're too proud to admit we made a mistake in the first place.

For example, Baby Boomers seem to get blamed for everything that happens, including botching up the way we treat animals on this planet we affectionately refer to as Mother Earth.

Now, I'll bet you doughnuts to dollars that every day you can find at least one story in your source of choice that reports another example of man's and woman's inhumanity to animal, blames something on Baby Boomers or both.

I know I did. In fact, I found two stories in two days in the same newspaper. (I don't mean I took two days to read the paper; I found one story in Tuesday's paper and another one in Wednesday's.)

Tuesday's story told how fish and other animals that live in North American waterways were disappearing much faster than land-based fauna. (As a trained journalist, I am bound by the Journalistic Oath to report exactly what I see and hear, and the original story used "fauna," not "animals" and not "flora.")

The frightening point about that statement is not that fish are disappearing, because there are a lot of fishermen and a modicum of fisherwomen around, but that land-based animals (that is, non-fish) are disappearing, too.

"Why are they disappearing?" you ask? And "Are Baby Boomers to blame?"

I don't know, but the very next day I found a possible answer to the first question in a story with the headline "First the bees, now killer crocs." The story said that the country that brought African killer bees to the Americas many years ago (namely, Brazil) had now imported African killer crocodiles.

Well, I don't have to tell you what that means. (No, those first killer bees aren't Baby Boomers--they died off years ago, as bees are wont to do.) According to a group of worried environmentalists and angry scientists, in just a matter of time the crocodiles would escape into the wild and work their way north just the way their Mother Earth brothers and sisters, the Killer Bees, did on "Saturday Night Live" back in the Seventies.

(By the way, is an environmentalist someone who makes a living by correctly guessing what card is going to be chosen and what someone is thinking, but works only out in the country?)

In fact, the bees are already here. They entered Texas in 1990 and were next found in New Mexico and Arizona. Experts predicted the first hives of Africanized bees would show up in California soon afterwards.

I can see it now. Comedy sketches on late-night weekend television with comedians dressed in big green lips and long floppy tails, speaking in phony Mexican accents to the guest host and causing gales of laughter in order to get our minds off the real-life danger of Killer Crocs working their way north, attacking groups of African women washing clothes in rivers and sometimes even boats and rafts.

They could already be here. Killer Crocs, which weigh as much as a ton and can grow 21 feet long, could be the reason for Tuesday's story about disappearing fish and other North American waterway animals. And I find it odd that the story didn't mention disappearing African women washing clothes, didn't mention disappearing boats and rafts and didn't blame Baby Boomers.

I shudder just thinking about 21-feet-long, 2000-pound reptiles slowly waddling north, attacking washerwomen, boats and rafts and picking up a Mexican accent as they made their way to North American waterways.

Anyway, back to how we never seem to learn from our mistakes and don't even admit we made a mistake in the first place. Have you ever heard any Brazilians say, "Oops! Sorry about those Killer Bees"?

Have you ever heard anyone say, "Oops! Sorry about those Crocs"?

Now, did you happen to hear or read the story sometime back about the flock of black birds that took up residence in two California homes?

If we don't learn from our mistakes and if we don't admit our mistakes, then what is to stop Mother Earth from telling a gangle of Killer Crocodiles to take up residence in your house when they get here? Or would you prefer a blizzard of bees?

And how much longer after that before the Baby Boomers get blamed for all the Killer Crocs and Bees in our pantries?

I rest my case.