Turtle On A Post

This is a brilliantly mischievous story with which many of us may be familiar, yet at the pain of repetition it is worth revisiting as it has a powerful lesson whose ramifications confront our particular spheres of life again and again. Had one not the benefit of the moral of this story, there was a real and present possibility of frustration and disappointment taking over space where good sense might have camped .Stories like this one provide an anchor to the milling masses against being swept away by the tide of injustice and man inflicted misery. There still are beacons which provide hope and anchors which give strength to dig in against legions of gloom and want, but that is for a sadly dwindling breed of resolute people .We will come to that in a little while.

The story goes something like this. There was an old farmer who went to a doctor in town to get his hand fixed which was injured in a squeeze gate while herding his cattle into the barn yard. In the process they struck up a conversation which eventually converged on the state of politicians in the country and their performance as leaders. The wizened farmer said, ‘As I see it most politicians are Post Turtles’. What do you mean? asked the doctor. The farmer explained, ‘When you are driving down a country road and you see a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that is a post turtle’. The doctor did not quite get it so the farmer went to say, ‘ You know he did not get up there by himself, he does not belong there ,he is elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb duffer put him there to begin with’.

So it is not really the turtle who is stuck atop the fence post flailing his limbs madly but going nowhere. Blame really lies with the dim witted duffers below and around who raise these hopeless dwarves to their levels of incompetence and then let them bite deep into the national granary. Leatherback turtle is their aquarian monarch who commands the pitiably obedient mass of mud turtles. This character, unlike his messy ilk is hot blooded to the extent that his body temperature is slightly higher than the wet ambience around him. It is not because he carries the burden of leadership with any great sense of purpose or energy, but because his expanded physique requires higher levels of metabolism. His mute subjects experience no such thing, they just regurgitate or subsist on whatever is found upon the bed of the ravines, weedy ponds, sandbanks or caked mud flats. These crawling legions of turtles are in no hurry to go anywhere nor do they demand anything of their master. They just want to be left alone in their infinite misery and the irreversible lazy fate . However the Leatherbacks have disaster protection built into their hardened humps. It is so designed that it cannot be crushed by the jaws of the predators or those who may seek to topple them. Very remarkably these reptiles shed their skin in bits and pieces as and when a popular need might arise to present a fresh face, unlike their cousins the snakes who simply slide out of their disused hide.

Turtles are around since last 250 million years, in fact since eternity and predate snakes and crocodiles. Misery and godliness are eternal so will be the abject mud turtles. It is always that minimized masses are there first and their privileged masters descend latter. No wonder snakes came slithering down and crocodiles swaggered in, in style after the impoverished mud turtles had proliferated like worms. Even the prophets and avatars chose to be assigned to the races already groaning under disease, disorder and crushing oppression. Few out of the bales of mud turtles know that their master, majestic Leatherback has his eyes so placed in his crooked beak as to look upwards which may be the reason why he is completely blind to their plight below .Perch on the fence post makes it even more difficult for him to see what is passing over those wallowing in dirt underneath. All he sees is the vast blue sky, inhales fresh fragrant breeze and thinks all is hunky dory and cushy cushy. Unbeknown to multitudes below the Leatherback has a unique ability for popular theatrics. He seems to shed tears apparently pained at the sad plight of his subjects but in fact he is discarding excessive soluble salt that he imbibes from the sea. That is just as good for him; it frees him from the hardly flickering obligation to those whose salt he may have consumed. Salt has a peculiar place in our native folk lore. Metaphoric salt consumption places a moral duty over the beneficiary of fidelity towards the host in our strange neck of woods.

All species of land turtles are genetically timid and succumb easily therefore nature has conspired to fix their eyes by the lower sides of their beaks. That suits them famously as it helps them to scan the ground closely over which they are allowed to crawl and conveniently avoid meeting their master’s blazing gaze. They are not designed to see beyond what is immediately before them therefore are blessed with a naturally and perhaps blissfully ,short vision. So are their masters ,the blue blood Leatherbacks who strut about with pathetically inadequate world vision and destructive self delusion. In fact there is a strong possibility of a cerebral paralysis as these giants are known to suffer from a very low proportion of brain to body mass therefore very low IQ and painfully sloppy reflexes. One has hardly seen so confused a mass of worthless proto plasma piled so high and thrive for so long.

That may be why in a parched turtle habitat like ours they do not seem to notice that 57 %of the poorest children are not in the school, less than2 % of the GDP is being spent on education; one of the lowest in the world, 67 % Pakistanis do not have an opinion about ISIS whose recruiters and nucleus followers roam countryside planting the evil seed ,in Punjab and Sindh only 0.05 % households hold more than two hectares of land and rural landless have risen to 70%.(Michael Kugelman and Dania Ahmed in Foreign Policy, December 2015).That is a vast body of disoriented and disconnected men ready for the forge. Hunger is so fearfully pervasive that they toss dignity to the winds and storm free food where ever found ; rallies, weddings, funerals, anniversaries ,opening ceremonies or whatever. Nothing seems to ring a bell, not loud enough, as if they are stone deaf and bat blind. These are scary indicators of a rumbling volcano which can explode without notice and reduce everything to ashes. The difficulty is that try as one might, a turtle’s hard shell does not let him breathe well nor can the creature crawl out of his shell.

(Published in Monthly Tribute International on 01-07-2018)