Enough Is Enough

Honoring today's Get ICE out of Minnesota Day of Truth and Freedom

(Listen to the radio version here.)

I’m honoring today’s Get ICE out of Minnesota Day of Truth and Freedom and our economic blackout. As the mother of children not much older than Renee Nicole Good and the grandmother of a little boy no older than many of the children being abducted by ICE, I stand in solidarity with every Minnesotan fighting peacefully but assertively, passionately, and indefatigably against the gestapo-like ICE agents currently attacking my beloved state.

My deepest-held beliefs about our place in our human and natural communities were shaped in large part by my Catholic school education.

How can you memorize the Declaration of Independence in 7th grade without noticing the line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? How can you recite the Pledge of Allegiance every school morning for 8 years without noticing that it ends, every time, with the culminating words, “with liberty and justice for ALL”—no mention of race, creed, sexual orientation, or immigration status?

Obscene greed is at the heart of all of this. It doesn’t surprise me that the family fortune of the wealthiest man shaping this ugly period, Elon Musk, came about thanks to South Africa’s horrifying Apartheid system, his father’s wealth extracted from the blood, sweat, and tears of Black laborers. Peter Thiel, one of the primary architects of Project 2025 and the main backer and promoter of J.D. Vance, was born in Germany but also spent years of his childhood in Apartheid South Africa and in Swakopmund, Namibia, known at the time for its continued glorification of Nazism. Both men have praised Vladimir Putin and propped up Putin’s puppet, whose own family wealth was derived from damaging the environment and from the real estate practice of red-lining—limiting housing and financial opportunities by neighborhoods, based on race and national origin. These three individuals all earned their fortunes on the backs of others, and no matter how much they have, all three are insatiable in their greed to acquire ever more. None of them have even a rudimentary concept of equality, fairness, or the simple word “enough.”

One of my favorite movies, which my kids loved when they were little and now my little grandson Walter loves, is Mary Poppins. There are too many wonderful elements to the movie to have a favorite, except of course for the song, “Feed the Birds,” but a line that resonates deeply with me is delivered by Mary Poppins at the end of the scene where the Banks children first witness her magical powers cleaning up the nursery. It’s so fun that Michael wants to clean it up all over again, and Mary Poppins says no, “Enough is as good as a feast.”

Based on my Catholic education and something deep within my heart and soul, I’ve always had a strong belief that the richest people aren’t those who have the most; they’re the ones who want the least and share or give away the most. The truly rich take joy and satisfaction with what we already have, sharing our lives, experiences, and what money we do manage to accumulate because sharing in itself is joyful, not a cynical means to a tax break or better PR.

Hoarding is an innate impulse in many species, from leaf-cutter ants to rats and human beings. Whether we’re birds or people, it’s important for most of us to stock up on resources during times of abundance against future times of hardship and scarcity.

Least weasel photo by Kurt Bauschardt from Edmonton, Canada, via Wikipedia.

In the most memorable lab session when I took mammalogy at Michigan State, a graduate student dropped a live mouse into a cage with a weasel, and within a second—we were supposed to time it but it happened too fast—the weasel killed the mouse with a single well-placed bite. My lab was in the afternoon after the weasel had already been given one or two mice during each previous lab section that day. The grad student told us it had eaten one or two at the start of the day, but after that it was caching the bodies for later meals. When we came in, there were five dead mice lined up in a neat row; now the weasel added that sixth one.

The grad student told us that weasels are by nature insatiable, and this one would keep killing as many mice as the grad students could give it without ever considering that most of the bodies would rot before it could possibly eat them.

Weasels came upon their insatiable lust to kill naturally. They’re tiny predators with very rapid metabolisms, but their encounters with prey in the natural world can be quite limited at times, and hunting involves planning and strategy, not just grabbing mice dropped into their cage like manna from heaven. In the real world, the probability of a weasel taking more prey than it can eventually eat is low, which is lucky for them—the mice that they don’t eat are the ones who create their future meals.

Chickadees can cache 1,000 seeds in a day, and up to 80,000 or even 100,000 seeds in a single season, but they’re not squirreling it away at anyone else’s expense. All the chickadees in a flock work hard at this caching, but when one chickadee faces a disaster—say an ice storm takes out a tree where many of the seeds were stored—other chickadees don’t complain if it raids some of their stores. Chickadees include in their flocks any and every bird who wants to hang out with them, regardless of species—their only requirement is not hurting any of the flock members.

Blue Jays are famous for caching acorns. Each one hides thousands—far more than it’s likely to need over a typical winter. But that excess is hardly wasted—a full 88 percent of the acorns Blue Jays stash away are viable and, if left uneaten, will germinate to produce new oak trees providing acorns for future generations.

Most of us are like chickadees and jays, working hard to ensure our future and that of our families. And yes, just about every one of us wants to have enough to enjoy plenty of pleasures as well as necessities. But the human weasels in our world today hoard up far more than they could possibly spend on a lifetime of the most extravagant pleasures. Their profits are maximized by minimizing employee wages and benefits, damaging the environment that everyone needs, and eroding the social contracts that help the rest of us to live in a peaceable, cohesive community. They’ve created their own secure, closed community of wealth and power, the insularity protecting even the ugliest, most evil people within, and when any of the rest of us notice their evildoing, they stir up hatred and resentment among us to distract us from what they and their friends are doing.

One of the priests in my seventh or eighth grade religion class defined prostitution as taking money for or otherwise benefitting from doing anything that violates our conscience. And even for those human weasels who don’t have a conscience or moral compass, what satisfaction can money bring if they can’t be satisfied with millions or billions, but are ever insatiable for more, more? Enough is enough.