Each Thanksgiving I’m reminded of the fun the holiday used to be in school when we children would hear and read the stories about the Pilgrims and that first historic celebration, our making Pilgrim hats and collars, Indian headdresses and turkeys of construction paper and putting on skits. I was once favored to play the part of Squanto; but the closest I ever came to the reality of that first Thanksgiving occurred when I was a young boy and my maternal grandparents and I had moved to the mining claim in Boulder Gulch here in the Kern River Valley.

Thanksgiving morning I got up early and went quail hunting. In short order I had eight of the birds, returned to the cabin, skinned and cleaned them. My grandmother made dressing in a large cast iron pot; then carefully arranging the small birds all around on top of the dressing, she put the pot in the oven of our woodstove to bake. The result was a real Thanksgiving feast, each golden-browned quail a miniature turkey making for elegant haute cuisine.

Grandad pronounced it one of the best Thanksgiving dinners he could recall, and I was rightly proud of having provided the main course, some part of my Choctaw Cherokee heritage undoubtedly responding to having provided “meat for our lodge,” and being for Thanksgiving dinner made it all the more memorable and important to me. In true boyhood fashion, the thought of playing the role of Squanto in reality came readily to mind.

Very few of even my advanced years ever experienced such a memorable thing in their lives; and in my opinion are the poorer for the lack. Not that I am ungrateful for the cornucopia of plenty to be found in supermarkets, the ease and convenience of such a thing in our daily life. But such ease and convenience, such plenty does tend to make us unmindful of how so many throughout the world suffer real want and hunger.

True enough, you have to “walk in another’s moccasins” to appreciate their case; but I wouldn’t trade for America, a land of plenty. Still, I have the uneasy feeling that We The People, for the better part having never known real hunger and privation, have this tendency to take our “cornucopia” for granted; and there is something tending to selfishness, even inherently dangerous doing so.

Had Ben Franklin been able to look into the future of politics far enough I doubt he would have suggested the turkey be our national bird given the connotation that eventually evolved. But Ben being of a very practical mind was certainly correct in his evaluation about the worthiness of the turkey being considered since it had a very utilitarian function as a food item. However, despite Teddy Roosevelt’s astute reservations concerning the bald eagle no one has been anxious to append the name turkey to ball clubs or military groups. “The Screaming Turkeys” just doesn’t come off like “The Screaming Eagles,” nor would anyone want a turkey shoulder patch or badge. The bald eagle may not be so noble a bird as the turkey in the food chain, but because of the importance of symbols the bald eagle wins out since it makes a better symbolic picture, and as with so many things like politics for example the facts give place to perception being the key element.

Ok, you had to know there was going to be a zinger in this, and here it is:  Can Ms. Clinton overcome the perception of her looking like a turkey rather than an eagle? She has a definite image problem when it comes to electability. While the polls may favor her, when it comes time to vote people will want an eagle representing America, not a turkey.

Despicable as the Hollywood politics trumpeting the ACLU portrayed in the film “The American President” it remains one of my favorite films because of the warm love story and some really good lines. When Sydney is confronted with the potential fallout of her relationship with the President and needing only an egg timer to calculate the difference from being a pit bull to becoming a bimbo this would not have been true for a man in such a position. Unfair? Most definitely. But the world does not operate on the basis of fairness.

Eagles prey on turkeys; it’s all part of the food chain where the stronger prey on the weaker. Nature red in tooth and claw plays itself out among people and nations as well. We live in a very dangerous world, one in which the strong prey on the weak and America is coming perilously close to being perceived as a wounded animal inviting predators and scavengers to close in. The danger is real enough for someone like Pat Robertson to forsake “Christian principles” in order to choose an eagle rather than a turkey, and though the choice is obviously the lesser of evils, the lesser remains evil.

But such is the government of America that our choices for leadership have long been only choices between the lesser of evils. And as the dangers of evil increase throughout the world, our own perilously dangerous position in the world dictates the choice of an eagle, not a turkey.

The eagle may not be so noble a bird, but it is on the right end of the food chain in a world where the strong continue to prey on the weak. And nothing can circumvent the “natural order of things” in an evil world where men are the predators and women their prey; an historic world view and fact that in my opinion precludes a woman becoming President of America, especially given the dangers America now faces.