Flightless Bird - Dec 1 2023

Flightless Bird

Dec 1 2023

The slow moving emergency

it's easy not to notice,

carrying on as before.

The stalemated war,

fought to exhaustion

and neither won nor lost.

The bad marriage

that's harder to end

than simply make the best of.

We can all see

how it's destined to turn out.

But when denial

is the path of least resistance

you simply take a step

and then the next

until you're too far gone,

counting on the future

to take care of itself.

Or, instead of drift and complacency

take agency and act.

A game-changing weapon, perhaps.

Internal combustion, scrapped.

A clandestine affair,

then divvy up the assets

and hassle over custody.

Apparently, ostriches do not

bury their heads in the sand.

But we are experts at it,

imagining

some deus ex machina

descending from the heavens

to rescue us.

It's magical thinking

that will undo us in the end.

It turns out that the ostrich

is lying low

to go unseen,

hunkering down

from predators

and rival birds

instead of fight or flee.

As if the biggest bird in the world

   —   black and white

against the sand

pressed impossibly flat   —

could hide in plain sight,

imagining

that so long as it kept its head down

life would go on as before.

Reading the news, and as demoralized as usual.

The Ukraine/Russian war stalemated, with the future of democracy and the rule of law at stake in an increasingly autocratic world. In the Middle East, a never-ending war that becomes ever more intractable and feeds on itself.

The climate emergency, as another COP confab degenerates into the familiar litany of pious pronouncements, insincere promises, token gestures, bad statistics, short-term thinking, and the usual human greed. This is the difficult business of collective action, in which it's hard to see the benefit of being the first mover. In which I, with my oil-fired furnace and ICE car, feel like just another hypocrite. A fast moving emergency, yet the streets are just as choked with cars, everyone's still living exactly as before.

I'm not married. But it's a situation we all recognize, and so a good stand-in for all the examples of drift in our personal lives.

The trouble is, everything turned out OK in the past. All kinds of potential catastrophes. Narrow escapes, that looking back seem preordained. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here now. So why worry? Why act? Surely, we'll muddle through again. And anyway, what difference can one person make?Saturday, December 2, 2023