I've seen birds war over food before. I've seen seagulls swoop down and steal a
sandwich out of the hands of my daughter and I've seen a pelican narrowly miss
the tip of my son’s finger with its hooked beak but I have never seen such a
display of desperation as I saw this morning.
The two blackened creatures tumbled and rose, flying
haphazardly in every conceivable direction, defying gravity as they fought,
escaped and tangled with such furry that I was certain that both would perish,
oblivious to the dangers that raced past and the obstacles that lined the
highway.
Temporarily out of sight, I turned right and then right
again into the parking lot of the school.
My car slowed while I prepared to park and out of my periphery those
same gigantic birds swooped low over my windscreen, their wings actually
touching the glass. I could hear the
soft scrape as their feathery wings wiped my window, the feathers cleaning a
streak of glass of the dust that covered my car.
Just as fast as they had descended the two antagonists rose
sharply into the air and with a final thrust of effort the attacking bird
seemed to ram the defender causing it to drop its booty. I watched it fall, the legs and tail
spiraling haphazardly from side to side and up and down, the fur blown by the
wind as it crashed, almost purposely on the very spot that was previously
cleaned by the warring birds, now awash with the gooey remains, my windshield
now needing a new cleaning.
I don’t know if you would describe these events as weird but
they were unusual, the word weird means strange, eerie and even creepy. The used and battered being that bombarded my
windshield, had it been alive, would assuredly think the incident peculiar and scary
and if it wasn't dead before the fall it would have been after the back and
forth in the air and most definitely after the impact.
Seeing a strange event in and of itself is not the point of
this story and as you know by now it seldom is; my ulterior motive is to bring
to light the often futility of what humans do on a daily basis and the pointlessness
of what has become common place. We
fight, we disagree, we argue and chastise, judge and attempt to censure the
ideas and desires of others just so we can have some semblance of prominence
over another.
Our philosophies may be different and those differences seem
to be growing not only in numbers but in severity and with that severity the
punishments for non-compliance. I may
think I’m right and I will defend my position but when did it become fashionable
to degrade those that were different, who thought differently or acted a bit
out of the norm? Oh wait; it’s always
been that way. Man has never been
tolerate. Man has never been able to
abide the differences that make up our world.
Just look at history and you will see the evidence of racism, bigotry,
chauvinism and a level of an incipient hatred that has no teacher but is born
and seems to be a natural tendency rather than a learned trait, hence the
warning “that the natural man is an
enemy to God….”
And so it is that like those vicious and greedy birds, the
struggle of man continues, Neighbor wanting what they don’t have, Countries
plundering in the name of sovereignty, political parties postulating possessive
power in order to sustain or retake position and the individuals of all races,
creeds and stations forgetting the simple solution of their divine origins
following instead the adversary and universal antagonist without regard to the
eternal splendor of that forgotten golden rule.
Perhaps it would do us good to stop, for just a few moments
and reconsider our Natural selves and consider the effects of being more civil,
more loving, more charitable and more divine.
Those two birds could have shared, stopped fighting and battling over
that poor creature and had a meal together, but crows, I think, don’t have the
capacity to understand, Humans, I think, do.
