Congressman Jack Kingston of Savannah took a razzing last week when he went to south Georgia looking for a snake.
Website commenters had a ball when WMAZ-TV of Macon followed Kingston’s search for an endangered Eastern indigo snake.
Someone quickly barked: “ANY snake in our yard is an endangered species.”
Other comments read more like our letters to the editor.
“Heck, all he had to do was come to Macon,” said one. “There are plenty of snakes here in City Hall. Not to mention all of his friends in Washington. The largest of them all is Obama!!!”
And, of course, it got personal.
“What about the snakes in his head? He should have them studied.”
The bespectacled Republican couldn’t help but crack a joke about his search for the harmless indigo, one of the largest snakes in North America.
“They’re so much more pleasant than the crowd in Washington,” he told the TV station.
Kingston, rated by some as the most conservative member of Congress, looks like a typical guy with a wife, four children, two dogs and two cats. But what about those snakes?
“It’s golf for one guy, fly fishing for somebody else, it’s snakes for me,” he told WMAZ.
The TV snippet was sent to me by a friend from Ridgeland who collects snakes. He’s involved with the unusual goings-on at the place visited by Kingston: the 4,000-acre Mopani Preserve in Telfair County. That’s where Project Orianne is based, with scientists and other professionals working to save the snake with a host of partners, from government agencies and universities to conservation groups and a giant power company.
The project is named for a little girl who got to touch one of the smooth, bluish and gunmetal black indigo snakes and pleaded with her father to help save them.
This they are doing through land protection, land management and restoration, inventory and monitoring, captive breeding, reintroduction, and research programs.
“If indigo snakes are successful in an area,” my friend said, “everything that is supposed to be there is successful.”
What if we could say, “If mankind is successful in an area, everything that is supposed to be there is successful?” Things like oysters in the May River.
It requires a point of view that mankind, while dominant, is part of a bigger picture.
It’s sort of like Congress, and all the commenters screaming back and forth. Maybe Kingston can go back to Washington and show them how to care more for America than their own political species. If they don’t, we the people will become as endangered as a snake in a south Georgia yard.