Yahoos with Guns

Wow, two posts in one day...what are the odds? Clearly I hadn't planned on posting anything else today, but I just read the most interesting local news story. Our local town hall is just over a century old, and its cupola is currently undergoing a renovation/rehabilitation to make sure it doesn't collapse onto the sidewalk and pedestrians ninety feet below. On top of the whole shebang is a copper-plated bald eagle, which has also been removed for restoration. Part of the original construction, the eagle was originally covered with a thin gold leaf which has over the years been painted over with aluminum paint, and also covered with splatter from roofing tar. Far from its native gold appearance, the eagle has had, since I've been living in this town, a green tarnished look to it.

But what surprised me more was not how its appearance has deteriorated over the years. The story that I read noted that the copper plating had eroded in a number of places on the eagle, and the erosion had started on the inside. The inside? How could that be, unless its construction was faulty. When work crews removed the eagle from the cupola they found it was "riddled with bullet holes and weathered by 103 years of exposure...." Bullet holes? My first thought was what kind of redneck yahoos do we have around here anyway that would find it big fun to come to town and shoot up the eagle on top of city hall? As I read further, the truth was more ominous than fiction. Turns out the local police had shot up the eagle in an attempt to chase off pidgeons that had taken roost on the eagle. So it wasn't local redneck yahoos that shot up the bird, but the local law enforcement yahoos that did it. I'm reminded of an incident at the local petting zoo when I first moved to town twenty-five years ago. Seems someone snuck in one night and went to the area where the deer were kept. These things were so tame that they would come to the fence to see if you had any food. One night their luck ran out; they went up to the fence anticipating a meal and someone shot them dead. Makes me wonder if some cop-wannabe got some practice in long before his deadly confrontation with pigeons on a copper eagle. Sigh...if it looks like an animal and it ain't movin', shoot it.