SPINAL DYSFUNCTION

Frat is my acerbic buddy. It should come as no surprise to my readers that Frat is a cat. He is perpetually pissed off and ornery. And, as much as I hate to admit it, he is almost always right.

(See my rough sketch of Frat below, right.)

One day, we were laughing about the BMW car commercial where the adorable little girl, her mom and their pet Boxer jump into their SUV for an errand. The little girl peaks over the backseat to the directional screen in the dashboard to read where they are going: Dr. Smith, veterinarian, for Neutering. The innocent child asks her mother, “Mommy, what is neutering?”

The dog, smarter than the humans realized, knows what’s coming and jumps out the window. If you haven’t seen the commercial go to this link. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlvK-SRKdII) Since I’m a female dog, I find it hilarious that the male dog doesn’t have the stomach to face what is coming and runs when this tough decision is upon him.

I shared my opinion about the Boxer with Frat who immediately pointed out that dogs (and cats) aside, he felt that it was humans, not pets, that wouldn’t face (or make) tough decisions. I conceded that he seemed correct, but being a dog, I argued that humans just had too many choices today that they didn’t have in the past. Frat, always the contrarian, quipped in his amusing but offensive filter-free, feline mouth that humans fail to make hard decisions because they have a malfunctioning spine, i.e., “They don’t have one anymore.” He elaborated.

“They dodge the truth,” Frat elaborated. Humans don’t want to investigate all the facts of the Benghazi debacle because they don’t want to admit they made some mistakes. They smooth off the rough edges about America being in debt up to their eyeballs because they don’t want to face the fact that they outspend what they make. They (humans) didn’t read the 2,000-page Obamacare health bill before passing it because doing so might imply they disagreed with what the President inserted into it. They (humans) sweep hard statistics under my kitty litter because they can’t deal with talking about it. For example, that the Dallas-Fort Worth area euthanizes 500 adoptable dogs and cats A DAY and 33 shelters in Texas still use gas chambers to euthanize our kind.

Now you understand why I avoid controversial conversations with Frat. Having said that, there was a lot of truth to his remarks.

America, in general, is still the best place in the world to live, even for a dog. However, part of what makes this country so grand is that the majority of humans living in it have the spine to face, not run from, difficult decisions even when it is uncomfortable or inconvenient to do so.

So here’s my lesson of the week for all my human readers: choose one personal or work-related issue you’ve yet to face. Take 60 seconds to write down what it has cost you to play hide and seek with this issue and what you gain by delaying this decision. Then, in the words of Frat the Cat, “Grow a pair and deal with it.”