The brink of extinction

By night I am a triple nipple drag queen. By day, I work as creative and communications director for a marketing company in the Tech Center. One of our latest projects is attaching toothbrushes to the tusks of extinct mammals for a dental promotion. They’re given away at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s exhibit, “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age” running through May 27th.

Wooly mammoths have always fascinated me. It’s the convergence of my two most favorite things, elephants and dinosaurs. With a mastodon, you get two for the price of one.

Even more fascinating, besides finding the bones of mammoths, is that we’re unearthing whole animals, frozen in time. Flesh, fur and DNA. It’s thawing out in abundance, thank you global warming. When the latest issue of National Graphic came out explaining how close we are to cloning a mammoth, I peed myself. I’ll be the first in line for a wooly pet.

This got me thinking about another elephantine creature on the brink of extinction, the Republican Party. This is a party that has not evolved in quite some time. Focus groups in a recent 100-page report issued by the Republican National Committee describe the party as “narrow-minded, out of touch and a party of stuffy old men.” In other words, they are big hairy dinosaurs surviving off the stored fat of wealth and past power. RNC chairman Reince Priebus (his name just sounds ancient) even issued a video telling Republicans they can’t do things the same old way any more. They must be more “inclusive.”

Well, if you have ever tried turning an elephant around, you know what a daunting task than can be. Two weeks after the report, Alaska State Representative Don Young called Hispanics “wetbacks.” Inclusive? I don’t think so.

And just when two Republicans announced their support of gay marriage, along comes Republican Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon at John Hopkins University, who in the same sentence equated gay marriage with pedophilia and bestiality. As if that were not enough, Representative Louie Gohmert from Texas managed to bend his gun control opposition into a gay marriage analogy of people marrying dogs. It defies all logic. The wooly GOP blunders down the evolution path towards self-destruction.

Author and feminist Germaine Greer once said, “Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it’s one of the most charming things about them.” And I would add, “bless their hearts.”

To stay in the present, you have to keep moving and changing, or you’ll end up in the dustbin of the past. You should never stop growing, never stop learning, never stop improving yourself. If you do this, you will never grow old. As American author Wilford A. Peterson wrote. “You never grow old – you become old by not continuing to grow.” I feel younger already.