Large Fierce Mammal

My Boxing Day 2013 article, A Long Winter’s Night 2013 – Day 6: A Winter Lesson in Community, told the tale of a blizzard that buried my home town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia when I was about 3 years old, and how the citizenry had no choice but to suspend all matters of commerce and social intercourse in favour of throwing their efforts into digging life back to functionality.

In that piece, I made mention of the concept of “Community” as I have come to know it, and closed with:

I was very young, but what I’ve brought forward with me, absorbed from the adults that surrounded me then, was a vibrant sense of urgency, adventure, and even what I might call a festival atmosphere. Would the townsfolk of Lunenburg have asked for this to happen? Of course not, but when it did, they didn’t need anyone to step in and tell them what needed to be done. They saw to their families, then their neighbours, and expanded outward from there. Personal animosities were set aside to the greater good of all. These are things we will need to do again, in the same order, when the excrement gets entangled in the ventilating appliance any time in the future.

Community requires sharing in ways and to depths that are hard to fathom while basking in the perfection of an Autumn morning. In today’s touchy feely world, it’s not uncommon for a word that speaks to the heart as much as the head to hold different meanings for different people, while each conducts him or herself as though everybody is on the same wavelength. Where resources are limited, one’s first responsibility must be to see to the welfare of those who look to you for their immediate well being and survival. Then to one’s Trusty Kinsmen and Clansmen (that “family that ain’t blood”). Then to Comrades who may simply become so in a time of urgency because they join you in facing a common foe.

Through it all, friend and enemy alike laboured shoulder to shoulder, and in some cases grew a grudging respect between the previously estranged, of the sort that can only be found in shared hardship, where everything gets stripped down to the bare basics of what makes Man a social animal in the first place. ~ A Long Winter’s Night 2013 – Day 6: A Winter Lesson in Community

All this being said, here’s The Bad Egg, a short animated film from India about somebody who got into trouble not by ignoring these principles, but by not ever having learned them until it was too late.