The Futility of the Jumping Sparrow

As I rode my bike this evening I passed a driveway where a car had parked, its shiny body mirroring a sparrow that stood on the driveway beneath it. The sparrow could see its own reflection in the metal at the bottom of the trunk, so it kept jumping up and hitting its head against its enemy.

I tried to scare it away, but the bird was persistent. It had seen a threat and was going to remove it.

How can you argue against that logic?

We can see threats everywhere, just by looking

Like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who saw dead people, the sparrow was sure. It saw an enemy and knew it needed to protect itself. But as so often happens, to humans as to sparrows, the enemy was itself.

This close to the election, with new players in the game, we’ve also begun tightening our country further into Us and Them. It’s not even just our country. With the horrors happening in and around the Middle East, the long-simmering hatred between people who have lived in close proximity has finally boiled over into horror.

We’re letting the hatred spread.

This election has the possibility of changing even more about our country and the ways we’ve conducted ourselves for decades, even centuries. Fear. Hatred. Control.

We aren’t birds

We can be the sparrow jumping headfirst against an identical bird shown on metal. I think many of us are already on that path and won’t be steered off of it.

Or we can see that the bird above looks exactly like us. The colors on our bodies are different shades from each other, but we all have hearts and brains. In this country, our dominant religion tells us to love one another.

Let’s not be birds. Let’s love one another. Let’s make life good for everyone.