~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Being oneself, being human, can be so wearying. The sun shines. Somewhere near, a mockingbird is pretending to be a cardinal. Good signs, happy signs.
But across the way on a snag tree is an osprey screeing mournfully for her lover, and I turn sad. I’m with ya, girl. Where did he go?
My Audubon friend tells me the osprey is screeing to keep the eagle away from her fishing grounds in the river below her. I accept that as fact and continue in my belief: she’s crying for her mate.
These beliefs that we humans harbor bolster us as well as lead us astray: some people believe, against fact, that our former president is still our president. This seems a little more dangerous than my belief in a wild bird having feelings for her dead friend, but I persist against fact: I also believe that the mullet that jumps out of his watery existence is jumping for joy. He isn’t. He’s jumping for air or for a mosquito, to shake off parasites, to open egg sacks in preparation for spawning (research differs).
Beliefs: Fish jump for joy. Birds are sad to lose a lover. One candidate is going to be Prez because he says so, and his word is gospel.
I know from science that fish and birds probably do not have human emotions. But I like to believe otherwise. Maybe science doesn’t yet know just what happens in little fish and bird brains, but the fact that we know right now is the fact. It is not a problem in our lives.
Those who believe that a president is still a president when the facts prove otherwise don’t believe the facts. This is a problem.
I have no idea how we, huge community that we are – 330 million or so of us in this country – get out of this dilemma. If I want to believe, in the face of facts, that the fish are jumpin’ for joy, who does this hurt? If I believe, in the face of facts, that the defeated in any endeavor is the winner, this hurts my very existence in a community of fellow humans who, in the end, have to get along if we want to survive.
The belief in beliefs rather than in facts is now entwined within our freedom of speech that is written into our founding documents. In this age of constant comment, we all can have our own opinions and spout them incessantly, however much they fly in the fact of science, numbers and common sense.
Being fellow homo sapiens is indeed wearying. Shall we find solutions to our existence as the hoping, thinking, planning – indeed, the great communicating – species that we are? Or are we doomed to cross purposes by those very traits because we can choose to believe what we want and continue to communicate it?
