In the dog days of August, I watched my pond dry up under the beating sun. It looked like the miserable puddle defended by riflemen in Frederick Remington’s famous painting, “Fight for the Waterhole.”

From my perspective, it was a tragedy. I took it personally, and I shook my fist at Mother Nature. But the egrets and herons didn’t seem to mind. Getting dinner in the ankle-deep pond was like shooting ducks in a barrel for them. As many as a dozen of the hieratic birds arrived each morning to stalk its shallows, stabbing crawdads and frogs with their stiletto-like bills.

As we dragged our withered hides through the burning days on our parched hillside, we found it strange to read “Typhoon Soaks Taiwan” and “Texas Drenched.” I would have fallen on my knees and given thanks for half an inch of those fortunate downpours.

The cover of a European magazine showed two men and a woman paddling a rubber raft on the streets of Prague. “Enemy Water” and “Killer Rivers” were the headlines. Try “enemy” water on some Kansas Farmer who watched his corn shrivel in the heat this summer or a rancher who had to sell his herd of cattle because his pastures had burned up.

Europeans in general are more ardent environmentalists than Americans, and the magazine’s interpretation of the summer’s floods was doctrinaire: Global warming, provoked by burning of fossil fuels, was to blame.

“The energy springing from rising temperatures (due to burning petroleum and coal) makes precipitation more frequent and more violent,” one article said. If that causes rain, we should be running our cars and tractors day and night, I thought.

The magazine’s take on the floods was a secular one. But it wasn’t that different from the view that interprets all disasters as acts of God, retribution for our sins. In fact, some Kansas churchgoers blamed the drought on our greed and hedonistic ways.

There’s a kind of vanity in insisting that everything must have a purpose or a meaning from natural disasters to the 9-11 terrorist attack. And most of us have a “mind-set” that prejudices our interpretations of events.

A professor recently spoke here on “The Globalization of Nothing: Implications of 9-11.” According to him, the spread of American culture and products threatens the “indigenousness” of other peoples and provokes some to violent acts.

I love that word “indigenousness” because it exemplifies the ivory tower wool-gatherer’s fondness for abstraction and obfuscation. Why use a simple word when you can wow your audience with a clunky, abstruse one?

The professor’s mind-set was disdain for American getting and spending for McDonalds, Disney, shopping malls, credit cards which he, like some all-knowing sorcerer, grandly dismissed as “nothing.” He praised the Farmers Market for promoting a connection between buyers and sellers, and condemned impersonal fast food restaurants as “non-places” which purvey “nothing.”

I share the professor’s disdain for fast food, which is often slow and unworthy of the designation “food.” But there are trade-offs to every choice, and Americans have chosen low prices over quality and service. Fine dining is available, but it costs. And if all we had was the Farmers Market, we’d have to say goodbye to salad bars in July and bananas year round in Kansas.

By the way, is it really true that exportation of America’s products destroys “indigenousness?” There are many more ethnic dining establishments today than when I was growing up in the 50s and salsa long ago overtook catsup as the Number One condiment in the U.S.A. Globalization is a two-way street.

I doubt very much if the murderers of 9-11 had McDonalds or “indigenousness” on their minds when they crashed into the Twin Towers. As Thomas Friedman recently wrote, they came from the “least globalized, least open, least integrated corners of the world.” India and China, who represent one third of humanity, see globalization as their path out of poverty.

And is “indigenousness” an absolute virtue? Indigenous art, cuisine and customs are the spice of life. But indigenousness also inspires “ethnic cleansing” and deadly delusions such as “Aryan supremacy.” What were the Taliban expressing when they destroyed the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan if not indigenousness?

Such questions undermine the elegant edifices of Absolute Truth some intellectuals love to build. But the rain falls or refrains from falling on the just and the unjust. The meanings of things are blurred and truth is complex.

It turns out that drought isn’t all bad. According to “Ducks Unlimited” magazine, drought is essential to maintaining the health of wetlands. If water in prairie potholes gets too deep, the “emergent vegetation” ducks depend on for food and nesting habitat dies.

A recent letter, which also attributed 9-11 to America’s sins and excesses, referred to “nature’s exquisite balance,” another lofty concept which, like “indigenousness,” invites a second look. To me, nature seems to be almost always out of balance. This summer, it whipped up typhoons, floods, forest fires and drought. According to “Ducks Unlimited,” nature is a boom and bust operation. And ducks have adapted accordingly. Wet and dry cycles suit them just fine.

Nature sometimes has other things to do besides pleasing human beings. To understand the world, we must pry open our minds and loosen the strings of the systems we tightly weave.

Because I like ducks I am trying to learn to like the drought. I like to shoot ducks, and I like to eat them, which will probably annoy some with a mind-set other than my own.