What we're really fighting for

I just opened an online image so beautiful it stopped my thoughts, cut them off midstream so efficiently I forgot where they were going.

The image, captured in this glorious video from Renee Volpe, shows a bird constructing its home from young leaves she sews together with leaf thread. She suspends her architectural marvel from an attached leaf (almond tree?), a condo perched between branches, shielded from rain and hungry eyes. After she builds the walls, she lines the floor with softness, perfect for cradling her own belly and bellies soon to peck free from speckled eggs. I googled, ‘What yellow bird sews its own nest?’ and learned that it’s most likely a tailorbird, known for weaving natural materials into habitats.

The bird’s soft beauty speaks- white collar, yellow jacket, hat and pants in matching orange. But it was her purpose, her drive to protect and cradle life, that leapt from the screen and shook me. Her wordless mission said to stop staring at the destructive craziness du jour leaching from the White House and intuit, just for a moment, the real intelligence of life.

The bird’s quiet resolve somehow reminded me that the psychopath we’ve loosed on the world is only transitory. Even the concentration camps he’s building with critics’ names on them will eventually crumble. As horrific as this moment in America is, all of it will pass.

A bird builds a nest. A predator tears it down.

I write, too often, about what is wrong in the world. From where I sit, most roads to death and cruelty are built by emotionally stunted men too short on intelligence and too long on world-destroying power. On a good day I see them as a blip, a wrinkle, a mistake along our evolutionary continuum. Their self-preserving greed and wanton cruelty are nothing new; those traits have been with man since we first stood erect. Even today, despite the clear hindsight of history, the stupidest among us somehow still believe that naked aggression reflects superiority.

One of the deadliest Cro-Magnon predators to walk the earth has attacked ten different nations in as many years. Starting wars with no purpose other than to satiate an insatiable ego, he demands a prize for spreading peace, as if willing green to become yellow will make it turn. Despite his relentless attacks on science, he has unearthed one unwelcome truth: if he repeats a lie often enough, some not-insignificant cohort of the U.S. population will believe it is true.

The bird, our bird, is blissfully oblivious to a force so ravenous it took a wrecking ball to the White House, a force hellbent on destroying history because he knows history will not spare him. Our bird’s indifference reveals the glaring dichotomy of co-existing forces on earth: those that protect life, and those that destroy.

Intelligence can be deceptive

My mom tried hard to raise Catholic children. Her best efforts, thwarted by a hard life, began and ended with sending us to Catholic schools. When I was about nine years old, waiting in line for communion, I studied—really studied—the Stations of the Cross along the wall: violent whips, nails through bloodied hands, crowns made from thorns. Staring too hard or just hard enough, I suddenly realized I was being manipulated. This wasn’t a message of god, goodness, or the sublime, this religion wanted to control people, using fear.

For about the next thirty years I considered myself an atheist; researching “religious” cruelties through the ages delivered easy confirmation. Yet I still re-learned, whenever I walked in nature, that a vast intelligence lived there. How else to explain an acorn?

I’ve learned since then that trees and plants communicate with each other. Plants’ communication systems are composed of underground fungal networks, electric signals, and chemical signals. They don’t debate, they just work quietly to absorb sunlight and nutrients from the earth around them, making good use of what the stars sent us billions of years ago.

A bird? Or divinity?

One day, walking through the trees, my dearest friend Lois Osborn convinced me that I wasn’t an atheist after all. How can you sense the rightness of the universe and not believe in god? For someone so convinced of their own intelligence, how can you be so blind to deep contradictions? We agreed, finally, that god (“life force,” if you will) exists in the propulsion of life.

Lois, I’ll add, is an old school Christian. She believes there’s an evil force in the world akin to a biblical Lucifer. She believes in judgment—in another place and time, she might wear a MAGA hat. But she harbors an immense dislike for cruelty. She sees that MAGA Christians embrace cruelty as a form of governance that hurts others with no real thought of what Jesus would do. So I channel Lois as I watch the tailorbird video on repeat like it’s a drug.

Yes, an ugly annihilatory force is afoot in America, one that may reshape our nation for generations to come. We have no choice but to fight it. But along the way, we have to take breaks and touch grass. And we have to remember that even if this ugliness culminates in the worst possible outcome, some tailorbird, somewhere, will survive, peck through the ashes, and rebuild its nest.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.