It has been said before and will be said again: The End Is Near.
The End Is Near!!!
True story: humans are not actually looking at Apocalypse as a likely outcome. That would be far too conceited: a far too arrogant way to go out. It would really give them that Superpower badge of approval that the American Experiment has worked so hard to earn on behalf of the species. Taking the whole of the planet down with them, really: they need not prove they are so powerful. Apocalyptic fingerpointers and signwearers and doomsdayers: where did your power come from? Where did life begin? Where did your breakfast grow? Where did your last bowel movements get processed & returned to the Earth?
Really. Come, now. Even all those nuclear weapons: they are maintained and guarded by breakfast-eaters, they were invented and built by bowel-movers. They are quacked about and quaked over by the breathers of this shared air. They are made with uranium or plutonium mined from what? That’s right. The Earth upon whose skin they crawl. The Earth of whose body we are made. The Earth under whose weather they find themselves discovering hysteria & woe, healing & wholeness. The Earth whose sighs we ride with our wings wide and our eyes open. Humans are no less Earth than we Pigeonfolk! We know what they have forgotten. We could all blow one another to smithereens, but we won’t take this planet with us! We’re made of this planet.
Try as they might, the humans are never going to destroy this Earth with their pathological pathways. They’re not capable of the Apocalypse they constantly threaten and fear. No one’s transfiguring into the fallout monstershow heroes so many uninitiated children are secretly pulling for. Humans are not capable of actually severing themselves from Nature. Believe me, even if they self-destruct, they’re not aiming anywhere past Thunderdome.
What they do face is something far more real, far more practical, far more humbling. What they face is: total extinction of the species.
It has been done before (many, many times on their watch) and it is not afraid to be done again! The question is: will they bring themselves into balance or will they face the looming extinction provoked by poor choices, by ignoring conservation biology, by refusing harmonious adaptation? Will they heal from the centuries of repetitive trauma and corresponding pathologies in time to read the suicide note written by the very architects of their so-called modern civilization?
Well, my friends, it seems there is time to make choices, and it seems the only time to choose is the Present. But how does one learn what one refuses to see?
Something will need to help them open their eyes, to raise their sleepwalky lids. To raise their gaze from what was written to what is writing. And here, my friends: we raise our wings to the cause.
That’s enough. Let’s start a little more slowly. Swallowing too quickly can disturb digestion. Not to mention equilibrium.
This sermon of the Reverend Fledgling Flop was one of many verbal embellishments of the original text from which it was inspired. Readers of any excerpt of The Empathy of Nature, by one L. S. Columbia, would find a much more humble, subtle, invested investigation of interconnected, intergenerational, interspecies revelation. That is, if there were readers of said book. If the standard research tools used for measuring Reality were a bit less like hammers and a bit more like skin or hearts or bones or lungs. The findings would then occur less like nails and more like sunrises or musicals or orgasms. Or Pigeons.
In any case, the book was not published by the military research department where its author had secretly, vainly toiled upon it. It was not published at all, save for a few stray typewritten self-bound copies burning holes in the pockets of old houses. Its author was dismissed and harassed, then disappeared. Its ideas were castigated, squelched, and silenced by the steely arm of the US government’s favorite robot.
Meanwhile, the military industrial complex and the mass media have long continued the fight for ownership of the exact tone with which the culture would cry “Apocalypse! ™”
No one using those mouthpieces was talking about human extinction, not really, not with the level of humble relatedness that such consideration requires.
Extinction is something like a death. Apocalypse is more like a movie.
The squawks of indignance come readily:
What kind of nonsensical drivel is meant by the suggestion that a creature seven billion strong on this planet could possibly find itself facing extinction, rather than just causing it? What kind of superstitious crap might one be slinging, what kind of New-Agey twaddle is responsible? And how is it any different from the heavy-metal soundtrack of Apocalypse!™? Not a bit! Just more uptight shmoes trying to sell bunkers and indestructible soup cans and loads of duct tape! What in the world could possibly threaten the most intellectually advanced species, the most highly proliferated breed of earthling?
Well. A little history [1]:
There was a time when the open eye could watch the shade move in from miles away. At one time, the shadow that fell over the land could last for days, when millions upon millions of Passenger Pigeons passed over. Human beings would watch this phenomenon like the weather, gather its gifts when possible, curse its bad timing when convenient to do so. There once were so many Passengers it would be laughable to suggest their demise. There were so many Passengers it seemed like lunacy to regulate the human consumption thereof. Life was teeming with Passengers, and no conscious choices could threaten this fact.
In 1914, the Passenger Pigeon officially reached extinction.
The Passenger’s main cultural distinction among birds was that they lived in incredibly large numbers, flying from place to place in unbelievably enormous flocks, flocks that took the shape of the aforementioned weather patterns. These communities were so gravid with the mass of their innumerable families, there could be losses by the thousands without making so much as a scratch in their breeding blueprints [2]. So the Passengers went about their business for decades without changing their patterns, unable to recognize the danger they actually faced. As the culture beneath their wings developed an insatiable demand and remarkable ease in killing them off, Passenger population soon dropped past a point of no return. Since the birds had no official defense except through a scarce few environmentally-zealous members of the same predator species that had devised their doom, the Passengers reached their endpoint. A single bird, named Martha [3] by the species that had killed every last one of her ancestors, relatives, lovers, and friends, died in the Cincinnati Zoo.
This was just before the human war in which many Homing Pigeons, close kin to the Passenger, performed feats of great strength and courage on behalf of the army of the culture of beings who extinguished their cousins. Yes, the same braintangle trod from Mercutio to Maria [4]. Surviving Pigeon populations knew they were heavily overlooked by most birders and nature lovers. They knew they were branded with second-class status in the bird community due to some apparently distasteful combination of their numbers, their trash-pickup vocations, and their proximity to places where people openly peed in the streets [5]. They were quite aware that many members of the general public had an aversion to them at the least, a full-blown phobia at worse, an actual ornithocidal obsession at very worst.
Sometimes a cycle of great difficulty produces the conditions necessary for massive growth, unexpected thriving, unprecedented flourishing. Through the challenge of invisibility, the sting of persecution, and the pain of underestimation, the Pigeon has quietly carried on. And, behind the scenes, beyond the perception of most other species, Pigeons have been courting a serious comeback.
Modern Pigeons, evolving at lightspeed like all the rest, have become extraordinarily present to their many hidden talents and fascinating gifts. They have become intimately aware of their innate potential, cultivating developments that even the most dedicated of Pigeon Fanciers could never even fathom. Quite useful, that magic called Adaptation.
Like squirrels, they have gained some new skills since the 20th century: they have their own upgraded versions of that uncanny ability to gauge perfectly, down to the split second, a mad dash across the street to outrun an oncoming vehicle at 25, 30, 50 miles per hour.
Believe it or not, the Pigeons have been evolving exponentially.
Believe it or not, the Pigeons have learned about more than mere survival.
Believe it or not, the Pigeons have big plans.
In an extensive research study performed at the Psychology Laboratories of Harvard University–decades after one Livia S. Columbia attempted to publish similar findings out of an East Coast military research facility–it was discovered that the common Pigeon, or Rock Dove, possesses an impressive dolphin-caliber intelligence. Pigeons are able to recognize all 26 letters of the English alphabet, to differentiate between photographed images and faces, and to explore abstract conceptualizations, upon (reward-enhanced [6]) request. This may be hard to take in for the grey-matter-endowed, but there is indeed more. Pigeons pass the “mirror test,” which puts them among only three non-mammalian species to prove capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror. If you’re still saying, “Yeah, my kid in onesies can do all that,” try this one on: research also showed that pigeons were capable of completing complex mathematical problems on the same level as primates. Primates, you say? Well, what could possibly stand in their way? Many a genius of nature [7] has proven quantum mathematics superior to even the most adept of opposable thumbs.
Yes, you say, but all those thumbs are still hard at work. And they are attached to brains with slow processing systems, egos that haven’t gotten crucial updates. Spyware & malware & too many video games eating up RAM.
The unfortunate situation is that humans, carrying the extraordinarily disruptive plagues of myopia and narcissism, have been preoccupied with “controlling” the Pigeon populations. “Managing” the “bird problem.” They have employed various measures through the years, from all-out killing sprees [8] to surreptitious drugging. City-dwellers have become accustomed to the disconcerting sight of unexplained, perfectly-preserved dead pigeons in the streets, on the sidewalks, in the flowerbeds. Palm-pounding propagandists pummelled the populace with paranoia about parasitic pathogens. They called it “Avian Flu” or “Bird Flu” [9] and they scared everyone but the man in the park covered in birdfeed, the woman on the stairs with baskets of breadcrumbs, the little kids on the fire escape with a bagfulla snacks. So, years after the social punch was spiked with fear of birds (ornithophobia) and the vermin they carried (mysophobia), the relationship was pruned down one step further, casting the birds themselves as Vermin.
Human beings, even though they total over seven billion strong, are quite fearful of seeing other creatures in large hoards [10]. Depending on the person, there is a short-to-very-short fuse in reaction to encounters with “too many” of something. Swarms of bees. Teems of fish. Armies of ants. Congregations of spiders. Kingdoms of rats. Parliaments of owls. Infestations of cockroaches. Skyfulla pigeons. Humans tend to get all squeamish with direct evidence of the multitudes of other animalfolk sharing the planet. When pressed—and by “pressed,” it is often meant simply “presented” or “suggested”—humans may react with violent, unthinking explosions until the throngs of the Other have been subdued or destroyed. The species does not like to be outnumbered, even in small batches.
So. It’s well known among Pigeons that the “vermin problem” swept common human consciousness into an easily-manipulated pile of complaints and reactions. In this state of fear, there are very few individuals with any interest in record-breaking discoveries about the intelligence of the Pigeon. Fewer, still, would combine that interest with humble investigations into the slim possibility of human survival on the planet.
Those of us who exist at the nexus point are in for a rewarding adventure.
-**
1. Or future-telling, depending on when you read this mobius strip.
2.Survival by Mob Rule. Sound familiar?
3. Martha was the name of ole George’s wife, a trite joke by the culture of a nation begun by the paranoid conquest of puritanical freedom fighters seeking refuge through violence and declaring themselves supreme rulers. Right, name the last bird of the species you murdered after the wife of your great first leader. Amateurs. Much like “mount rushmore,” i.e. offensively shitty graffiti.
4. Enter the heart-wrenching cellos of Irony, the awkward oboes of Shame, the single flute of Wonder.
5. We’ll return to this later, under Decolonize the Dove education provided by the AEAE. In short, they’re way ahead of you, and you might wanna reconsider the habit of blaming animals for the deplorable human environments to which their behaviors have adapted.
6. See also: mesolimbic pathway, type B fun, this page, or Vanni Rigamonte.
7. For example…
8. No, for real.
9. Notably, “Avian Flu” hit the market shortly after “Asian Flu,” and some time after “Africanized Killer Bees” made headlines. You can see the trend. There has yet to be an outbreak of “Wealthy White Western Androcentritic Hypocritical Huff Hysteria.” At least not in official documents, anyway. Keep an ear out for WWWAHHH sufferers.
10. Trypophobia is so last decade. Solidarity on polyzoophobia, anyone? …which is an abbreviation of polyautoataxoatelodemokosmikoeisoptropantosymbolobolshephobia …which has now triggered metahellenelogophobia. Don’t worry, there will soon be online forums for all of these.