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
No comments:
Post a Comment