Adding Another Star Trek Kitty

Lt. Android Commander Pickleson. He is a good cat. And he is a pretty cat.

The Cats of Star Trek (so far!)

Lt. Science Officer Freddiecat: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Its only logical! Live long and pawspurr!”

Lt. Security Officer Binki, a Klingon warrior at heart, fierce (mean) and fully armed!

Grumpy Borg! Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

Everything calm right now

     There have been no further acts of aggression from the neighbors at this time as far as I can tell. They have left us alone for a few days. That is all we have ever wanted. To not be harassed, threatened, have our windows shot out, or any animals that we love abused. Who would have thought that we were asking the impossible?
     Friend’s have suggested many things we should do to protect ourselves. Some have even suggested getting married or moving in with a man. The neighbourhood men’s behavior of the past few days shows the dangerous violence men in our world today commonly commit. I would have to be clinically insane to want to live with that behavior in my own home. Steubenville, Chris Brown, Aurora & Newton: these and other violent acts are not the extreme. In reality this type of behavior in men is commonplace. All over the world in places without effective civil government and police forces, men rape, kill, and wage war on everyone around them. As our government continues to become more ineffective, outside terrorists are not the biggest most dangerous threat. The biggest threat to the individual personal safety of American citizens, especially women, is American men. The police either cannot or will not protect us from violent men. The Republicans continue to reduce funding for police departments, and they almost shot down the Violence Against Women Act completely. They continue to reduce women’s rights when it comes to basic reproductive health care. And they protest against equal pay for equal work. The rights and protections of humans in America are quickly eroding, at least for humans born female.
     One very frequent su
ggestion was to get a gun. I still am against contributing to the gun violence in this country by adding yet another shooting gun to the mix. Police officers have guns and they are killed in America all the time. US military personnel are armed to the teeth, and they are killed and horribly injured every day. What exactly do they think I should do with a gun, anyway? Should I answer the door pointing a gun at whoever is outside? The so-called “Doomsday Preppers” have gained attention in recent years for their stockpiles of assault weapons and seeming intense desire for opportunities to kill their neighbors. Maybe “Mad Max” looks like fun for those people, but that is not the type of world I believe is worth fighting to stay alive in.
     So for right now we wait. Hopefully things will stay calm. The police have proven time and time again how useless it is to ask them for help. Maybe we’ll be okay, maybe we won’t, but whatever happens, this country is full of women who don’t want this kind of useless savage violence to be just another part of everyday life in America. Women all over the country go through their lives just hoping to be safe, and for everything to be okay, and knowing that if things are not okay there isn’t much they can do about it. Men have controlled the world for tens of thousands of years. This is the world they have created. And what a violent dangerous unsafe world it is.

Record of events for “just in case”

     Yesterday an old stray kitty we sometimes feed was the innocent victim of a crime against animals. Some evil person rubbed human feces down his back, in a straight line as if it were the white stripe of a skunk. We live in a very bad neighborhood. Our suspects are the ex-con with the pit bull across the street, the neighbors on our right, the neighbors in the yellow house on the corner, or maybe the men down the street.
     The ex-con with the pit bull has three sons and lives with his elderly father. He is covered in tattoos, wears “wife beater” undershirts, a Mohawk, and baggy pants. He has been seen breaking into vacant homes in the area. This may have been the cause of his stint in jail, during which his sons and pit bull began staying at his father’s house across the street. These boys shoot BB guns at cats and squirrels and any other animal they see. They broke our living room window with their BB guns as well. Their father and grandfather refuse to stop them. They threaten us and then tell the police they didn’t do anything. The cops refuse to help us, protect us, or deter them in any way.
     We seem to have reached some form of truse with the next door neighbors on the right. They keep groups of foster kids, three or four at a time, and seem to have a completely different group of kids every three or four months. They are loud and annoying, and they have openly stated their dislike of cats, but for the most part we leave each other alone.
     However, they do have friends on the other side of them whom I didn’t mention before. The women from there has driven past our house screaming obscenities at us. I have no idea why. I have never done anything to her, complained about her to anyone, or even know anything about her. Apparently screaming obscenities for no reason at people you don’t know is par for the course in this neighborhood.
     The people in the yellow house I never see up close really. They spend more time in their back yard than in the front. They occasionally hold very loud parties in their back yard. I think they have big speakers back there. Sometimes they shoot off illegal fire crackers. It sounds like our whole neighborhood is getting bombed. I don’t think these are just any small handheld fire crackers. They were way too loud and big for that. It is loud, scary, and during the prolonged Texas drought, extremely hazardous to us all. Several houses in the area have burned down in recent years. I have called the police before on them, here and there on occasion. As usual, the police never do anything. With the fire crackers on the fourth of July and New Years, it is widespread knowledge that the 911 operators shut down on those nights. When you call you might get a recording. One year 911 somehow connected me to the local Air Force base. They couldn’t hear what I said into the phone inside my own house, because of the near war-zone shelling going on outside. Again, the police did nothing.
     Then there are the young men who live down the street. I don’t know what their relationship is to each other but I think they might be brothers living with their elderly grandfather as well. A few years ago one of them exposed himself and urinated in front of our house in broad daylight. I have never called the police about them before or since this one incident. Before that I had never really paid that much attention to them one way or the other. They had never bothered us and we basically were doing our own thing. I have no idea why that man, who at the time was an adolescent boy, would do that. After he urinated he just walked right back home. Behavior like this and the obscenity-screaming women in her red Buick completely baffles me. I did call the police on this disgusting display and spraying of potentially dangerous bodily fluids. Again, the police did nothing. And in the years since, the older man from this house comes knocks on our door and offers to mow our lawn. We have been a repeat customer. We always pay him first, but it sometimes takes him more than a week to get around to mowing the lawn, and we have to remind and ask him again and again.
     Yesterday I came out on my front porch to check the mail. It was just another ordinary day and I had no reason to think that anything unusual would happen. We haven’t had a disagreement with any of our neighbors in quite some time. I saw Fribbit, the pitiful stray kitty, on the front porch, and he had been smeared with feces as I described. Fribbit is an elderly stray. We have tried to catch him. He scratched us both up badly. We have called Animal Control to come pick up and help him and other sickly strays in the past. They say its not their job. So occasionally we feed a poor starving stray. We don’t like to see any creature suffer. The neighbors have called Animal Control on us for feeding these poor strays. When we call Animal Control for help, most of the time they won’t even get out of their truck. We stopped calling them for help because they do not help.
     The man with the pit bull is the most likely suspect. He repeatedly has harassed both my mother and I. He trespasses in our back yard. He openly says he refuses to restrain his extremely large unaltered male pit bull, and he specifically has said that he does this as revenge because cats occasionally wander into his yard. I don’t think a small terrified stray cat running through his yard and his giant unattended threatening growling barking pit bull on my front porch are at all comparable. So, with this man’s aggressive and antigonistic previous behavior, my mother thought first of him.
      I had just seen Fribbit that way and there he was, walking down the street with his pit bull and two of his sons. I lost it. I started screaming at him. He ran up onto my front porch, pit bull in tow, and screamed back at me. He got right up in front of my face, spitting on me as he screamed at me over and over: “Whatchoo gonna do about it bitch? Whatchoo gonna do about it bitch?” Then he screamed that he didn’t want me yelling at him in front of his kids. Apparently he is fine with his kids seeing him threatening a women none of them has technically ever spoken to. He threatened the future safety of me and mother. He said repeatedly that he was planning on catching any cat he can and “doing something” to them. He left, walked down the street to the urinator’s house, and was joined by two of those men. They all began making threatening gestures as a group. He felt the urge to come back and scream threats at me two more times before the police finally arrived. He kept saying “All these cats gonna go bye-bye. Me and my cat-hating friends is gonna have us a cat-catching party tonight.” So he doesn’t want his sons seeing a neighbor woman yell at him for his abuse of animals, but, again, he is fine with showing his sons how to aggressively threaten and harass her, using his dog as a weapon, ganging up with his male friends, and threatening more abuse of animals.
     I had to call the police three times during this scenario before they finally decided to come. By the time the first officer arrived, I was so upset that I couldn’t breathe. (I had been having a lot of trouble breathing lately. We live right by the high way. There is a lot of pollution and I cannot afford to pay a doctor. I have numerous medical problems, including epilepsy. I can afford the generic tegretol at Walmart for 4$ but I cannot afford to pay a doctor to get the script, so I go without and hope for the best.)
     So this police officer called an ambulance because of my breathing. When the ambulance arrived, pit bull man and his male friends were at their house down the street, and they cheered and applauded. They were happy that I was sick, and not at all ashamed to show it. Again, the authorities did nothing.
     In the end the police and ambulance left. They did nothing, as usual. The “powers that be” here do not show any interest at all in protecting us from violence. The police have done nothing as the neighbors’ aggressive harassment of us has escalated over the years. I tried to explain some of this to the officer. The police refuse to punish anyone around here for anything, and offer no protection from the future violence that is sure to come. These criminal acts against us show no sign of stopping. Indeed, since these men have learned, from the complete lack of police action, that there are no negative consequences for them to be afraid of. The police left, knowing they were abandoning us to our fate with no hope of help from them. Before he left, the first officer kept asking me: “You know I’d help you if I could, right? You know that, right?” I do not feel obligated to reassure him or soothe his possibly damaged ego. He might have actually left us here to be gang raped and killed, not to mention the promised torture of innocent animals, and then this police officer wants me to make him feel better about his actions. No!
     In the end we just have to wait and see what happens. I am posting this as a record, trying to be as complete and thorough as I can in as brief a summary as possible. I do not know what to expect, but I do not feel safe. If you are reading this, do not panic yet, but be aware that this is being posted for any potential “just in case” scenario. If something bad does happen, if any of these men does some violent act in the near or not too distant future, I need to know for myself that I have spoken. So, just in case.
     Spiggy out.