What's a Prairie Dog?

So what's a Prairie Dog?
It's a furry little animal that's at the bottom of the food chain, no matter who is on top. They make a lot of noise, but the predators don't mind that. It just makes them easier to find. Before man arrived in the prairies it was the main source of protein for coyotes, wolves, hawks, eagles, and even crows and magpies. today they're wiped out by the millions by farmers, golf course grounds keepers, and other humans, not for food, just to get rid of them. In the process, of course, the poison that kills them off passes on up the food chain and wipes out millions of birds and animals, all the way from eagles to some little kid's pet dog.

In human society the role of Prairie Dog is taken by the poor and homeless, by ordinary working men and women, and even by people fairly high up on the political food chain. For example, look how fast Rumsfeld was thrown overboard when Bush's party lost the election. But most of us never get that high up. We just toil away at the daily grind, usually living from paycheck to paycheck. Half of our paycheck is confiscated by the human eagles and wolves who are our masters. Every so often one of the Masters gets mad at one or more of the other Masters. Then they stuff us human prairie dogs into uniforms and send us out to kill each other. No fewer than two hundred million of us were slaughtered during the past century, to satisfy the blood-lust of the Masters.

To be sure, they let us make some noise. They call it free speech and all of us human prairie dogs are allowed some free speech. The amount varies from one prairie dog town (nation state) to another. But in any nation our speech is free only so long as we don't get uppity and start challenging the Masters. They even let us vote in their elections, and make a big circus of it. Their "free" schools (which we pay for) and their "free" press (which they control, have done a great job of persuading us that it makes a difference which of their political parties we vote for. That's something like giving us the chance to vote on whether to die by hanging or by firing squad.

Even when, on rare occasion, we all get together and rebel against the masters our freedom is illusory. In every case known to history the leaders of the rebellion became the new Masters and the masses were no better off than they were before they rebelled. Napoleon co-opted the French Revolution. Cromwell was no better than the King that he killed. It didn't take the leaders of the Russian Revolution to become worse than the Czars. In the Americas, North and South, every revolution has wound up with tyrannical people seizing power in some degree, from absolute like Castro to partial like the Bush/Clinton/Bush trashing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

You know, us prairie dogs were better off a few centuries ago when all we had to worry about was the Black Death or Attila the Hun.