Posted By: Stephanie Gutmann at May 9, 2009
Posted in: Eagle Eye
The Lord works in mysterious ways, delivering heroes just when we need them most.
It was a bleak January afternoon. There were months to slog through before spring came and the daily financial news was the most apocalyptic I'd ever heard. And then, on the 15th, there was that news flash: a crippled plane had downed in the Hudson....but, but... all 155 passengers were safe! They were standing on the wings! In the middle of the frozen river! With tugs and row boats and everything else New York harbor could muster racing toward them. For days afterward, a grateful nation turned over details of the amazing tale of US Airways pilot Chesly Sullenberger like children examining a gift train set: How he'd calmly told New York air traffic controllers "We're going in the river," how he'd walked the length of the fuselage in knee-high water to ensure everyone was out. And I sincerely felt at the time that "Sully", as the entire country came to know him, had been sent to us to lift our spirits and remind us what bravery looks like.
A few months later, a tense spring. Financial news still apocalyptic. And suddenly a YouTube link appears and we are mesmerized by a spunky little lady named Susan Boyle who marched into the Belly of the Beast of agesim and lookism with her chin up and a glint in her eye. Women everywhere wept and wept because...for a complex of reasons...maybe because we thought of all the times we'd told ourselves we were too old or too fat and hadn't held our chin up like Susan.
And now He has brought us the latest inspirational figure. The hills 'round New York ring with the name of Molly the Cow -- another lady with an unfashionably plump (500 pounds) figure. Just as the world shows itself, once again, all too ready to line up behind particularly dangerous leaders, this all-black heifer emerges to show us, literally, that we don't have to placidly follow the herd to destruction. Molly, she has only re
cently acquired this name, was one of a multitude of anonymous bovines standing in a pen outside the Musa Halal slaughterhouse in Queens, New York waiting to be herded inside when she apparently decided, "Oh no you don't, bub." According to news reports she butted her way through a fence and then "charged up 109th Street with a butcher along with several responding officers hot on her tail. Witnesses, shocked at what they were seeing, steered clear of the animal ...After a chase that lasted nearly an hour, the New York City Police Department's Emergency Service Unit managed to corner the cow in a residential yard... Officers used tranquilizer darts to calm the animal, before loading her into a police horse trailer that was brought to the scene. It reportedly took at least a dozen cops to get the stumbling cow into the trailer." And not before she'd knocked a nice hole in the trailer all with her stubby horns.
Now, Musa Halal might have just come picked her up and dragged her back, except -- and here the story takes a post-modern twist -- Molly was now too famous! She was "the renegade cow" as one newspaper put it. The Daily News had ended its story on her with "Go Molly Go!." So the slaughterhouse instead released her to to the Center for Animal Care and Control in East New York which in turn announced that, as an unclaimed animal, she would go to the first viable owner who appeared. Offers poured in.
The ending is so sweet it's almost Disney-esque: Molly was claimed by an 60-acre organic farm on Long Island, about 15 miles from the Hamptons (should she be nominated to be a mascot at a film festival or something.) The owner has no untoward plans for her, only that she "eat some good organic hay and hang around with a lot of her friends." He has parked her across a fence from Wexler, a friendly steer (who is also a "rescue animal" having been taken over from a school-childrens' agricultural club that lost its financing) and the news media has already swarmed around taking pictures of Molly with her new "boyfriend." "Molly Escapes Death and Finds Love," blared the New York Post's headline.
"She can eat and sleep for the rest of her life," the farmer said. "She is not going anywhere. The bottom line is she will have a very good home.”
A lesson for us all: Never say die. Don't let the bastards get you down. Question authority. And always, always, Go for it!
Now, Musa Halal might have just come picked her up and dragged her back, except -- and here the story takes a post-modern twist -- Molly was now too famous! She was "the renegade cow" as one newspaper put it. The Daily News had ended its story on her with "Go Molly Go!." So the slaughterhouse instead released her to to the Center for Animal Care and Control in East New York which in turn announced that, as an unclaimed animal, she would go to the first viable owner who appeared. Offers poured in.
The ending is so sweet it's almost Disney-esque: Molly was claimed by an 60-acre organic farm on Long Island, about 15 miles from the Hamptons (should she be nominated to be a mascot at a film festival or something.) The owner has no untoward plans for her, only that she "eat some good organic hay and hang around with a lot of her friends." He has parked her across a fence from Wexler, a friendly steer (who is also a "rescue animal" having been taken over from a school-childrens' agricultural club that lost its financing) and the news media has already swarmed around taking pictures of Molly with her new "boyfriend." "Molly Escapes Death and Finds Love," blared the New York Post's headline.
"She can eat and sleep for the rest of her life," the farmer said. "She is not going anywhere. The bottom line is she will have a very good home.”
A lesson for us all: Never say die. Don't let the bastards get you down. Question authority. And always, always, Go for it!
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