Elephants in the Room
Did you hear the news? After 146 years, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is folding its tent in May. It’s sad news for circus lovers, but the writing was on the wall last year when the circus retired its elephants. The elephants were the greatest attraction for “the Greatest Show on Earth,” and without them, already-falling ticket sales fell even further.
The reason for retiring the elephants depends on who you listen to. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) said it applied pressure long enough and hard enough to shake the family-owned business into doing the right thing for its herd of Asian elephants. The family said PETA wasn’t a factor. They said they just resolved what has been years of internal discussions. Apparently the “elephant in the room” has been the elephants in the room.
I won’t get into the arguments about whether the elephants were mistreated as performers, except that I’ve read about the sharp bull hooks used to prod them into action, which sounds pretty rough. Some say the elephants don’t like the crowd noise, bright lights and music, but it’s a known fact that elephants are extremely social animals.
When I worked in downtown Fort Worth, it was an annual tradition to stand at our high-rise windows and watch the Ringling Bros. elephants walk from the circus train to the convention center. We do the same thing on Saturday mornings in the fall as our college football teams walk from the bus to the stadium. It’s all good fun, right?
Harmful or not, the circus retired the elephants to the company’s 200-acre Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida, and the remaining performers will look for new work when the farewell tour ends in May.
So, here is the question for Lent. (Really? Yes, really): What elephants are we keeping, acceptable or not, that we need to retire – because they are hurting us (or we are hurting them?), or they are taking up space in our lives and our schedules. It might be an addiction that is hurting our health and harming our family, or an otherwise innocuous habit that has become an obsession and is absorbing our time or resources. Or it might just be holding on to something from the past that we don’t really need any longer.
Lent is often thought of as a time for giving up things, primarily for the purpose of clearing the mind and heart for the spiritual journey to Easter. But some use the time to make a commitment to long-term letting go, and in doing so creating room and energy for new things – better things.
Retiring to the conservation center is a great move for the elephants. The human performers will have to find new ways to share their talents, but sometimes a difficult change makes room for new opportunities. What might we eliminate or change that would clear the way for something new and fresh?