Nature bats LAST.—Bumper sticker seen in a parking lot
One morning last fall, Janice and I stepped out onto our side porch and there, on the ground, was a dead Baltimore oriole. An unfortunate casualty of living at the foot of a hill at the foot of a mountain is that the wind currents sometimes cause birds to hurtle into the side of our house with a thud, which is probably what happened to this poor little creature.
Even as it lay there, the bird’s iridescent beauty stopped me in my tracks. The only orioles I’d ever seen were baseball’s Baltimore Orioles logos, and although those drawings were accurate renditions in that the birds were orange and black, seeing a real one was another thing entirely. It reminded me of how the writer Annie Dillard once compared seeing a partial eclipse of the sun to a total eclipse: She wrote that it bore about the same relation as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of the sky.
This fellow citizen of nature had dropped out of the sky, ending its life while adding meaning to mine. For I saw in that moment how the infinitesimal diversity of the animal kingdom is the natural order of things, how in the bird kingdom alone we are hit with a dizzying and dazzling array of colors, sizes, shapes, songs, habits, habitats, and lifestyles. And that this is not unlike humankind.
We have all of what the birds have minus the wings, a true diversity that also includes many faiths, beliefs, and philosophies. But you could take it further and say that the natural order of us upright, two-legged creatures is also one of equity and inclusion. Equity, because humanity only moves forward when power is balanced and class is set aside, and inclusion because no one person can go it alone; interdependence is essential to survival, and if you remove even one person from the equation, the tower somewhere, somehow becomes less stable, just like in the game of Jenga.
I suppose you could argue otherwise. Does the death of someone in China, for example, affect any of us here? How do we know it doesn’t? What I do know is that the bigger picture, the mega-uber Jenga tower, is definitely affected. For me, the inequities in our still-segregated society and the exclusions brought about by racism, misogyny, xenophobia and other-ing, not to mention territorial invasions and genocides, are what keep us from enjoying the paradise we were all given. That Garden of Eden we think is on the other side could be here right now if everyone was granted full citizenship and a universal fairness prevailed.
Our one saving grace? Diversity. If it weren’t for the dizzying and dazzling display of humanity, the fact that nature continues to create more and different kinds of us, we would sink into the ground. The widening array of human skin tones over time is the color of resilience, and the many voices and languages converging into more and more spaces, walls and ICE raids be damned—that is the sound of inevitability.
So, in fact, diversity is our strength. By its very nature, it only grows. It doesn’t retreat. It is not subject to tariffs and you can’t legislate it away. All the proof you need is to look in the mirror: Each of us is the product of the increasing diversity of the human landscape that has transpired over millennia. That gives me hope. There’s a lot of talk these days about being on the right side of history. It may matter more that history has sided with us.
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Rob