It’s election day, and I’m having a hard time looking at the news. It's pretty simple, really. I just can’t stand watching (or reading) the bloviators from the right and middle covering tragedy as though it’s a ball game, with false-equivelencies euphemistically labelled “background”, and then laughing at this general misfortune we seem to insist on plaguing the world—and ourselves--with.
So I took a walk up the nearest mountain, which almost made me feel worse. You see, I’ve spent a lot of my adult life watching birds through cheap binoculars, learning their names, their habits and habitats, and their schedules. I've never became an expert, but I love to watch them and, in doing so for so long, I learned a thing or two, about the Land and about how to live here. Over the last five years, though, I've noted the dwindling in the numbers and types of birds that used to be so prevalent a mere decade ago, especially the migrating ones like the little warblers, and this walk was no different. I saw a couple of house sparrows, a crow and a magpie, and that was it. So I came back home thinking I might as well check in on the horse race. But I haven’t yet. Better to sit and write a few words for the ether first, get it off my chest. Maybe it'll make a difference in a hundred years or so when it's just background, and we're all seen as "quaint" like cowboys.
So here it is, coming from the empty part of myself where such losses resonate, off my chest and out into your internet ether:
How. The. Fuck. Can we, the people, who share this fragile planet with so much and so many, not only not see this pure tragedy happening before our eyes for what it is, but watch instead some coiffed and buffed entertainer on T.V. (or whatever--pick your poison) laugh, and then laugh with them as if it's all some rich joke? Are we that easily entertained? Is that all there is that’s left of us?
