Finally, I scanned the “World in Brief” in The Economist. I was not expecting much, to be honest. What I read stopped me cold. The United States military, at the order of the President, had attacked Venezuela and taken its President and his wife into U.S. custody. It was revealed later that a precise and deadly military operation had killed at least forty people. My immediate jumble of thoughts? Power exercised without consent. A state acting beyond its borders. The language of force, of justification, of necessity.
I felt the familiar jolt of disbelief and anger, followed almost immediately by something quieter and much harder to name. Was it helplessness? What could I do with this information? I could judge it—I think with some understanding, having taught on war and terrorism and political philosophy at the university for a quarter century. I could lament it. I could file it away among the growing archive of things that should not be and yet are.
Later in the morning, walking down the driveway, Jane saw a small bird lying still on the ground. A chickadee. Fully formed. Perfect. It had no visible injury and no sign of violence. It looked as though it had simply frozen in the night. Jane tenderly picked it up. We paused our day for several minutes.
I was surprised by how deeply this touched me. More than the headlines. More than the abuse of power that had greeted me earlier in the day. The bird was delicate, beautiful, complete. Its stillness was absolute. I stood there longer than I had planned, noticing the fine pattern of its feathers, the smallness of its body, the quiet finality of its death.
I felt the dissonance almost immediately. Why should this affect me more than human suffering on a far larger scale? What does it say about my priorities that the death of a single bird could move me more than geopolitical violence? I did not try to answer those questions too quickly. The dissonance stayed with me most of the day.
The difference, I think, lay in proximity. The news was real, but it was abstract, mediated, curated, and out of my reach. The bird was present. It lay in my path and asked nothing of me except attention. Care, as those who write about the ethics of care have long reminded us, requires contact. Attention has a location.
What to do with the little bird? We would normally bury it, but the ground was frozen solid, too hard to dig. Nearby, a fallen tree was already breaking down, its wood soft—before the freeze—and dark with decay. I placed the bird there, among the rotting fibers, and covered it gently. In time, it will become soil. In time, it will nourish other life.
I spoke to the little bird quietly and thanked it for its beauty, even in death. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I received its death with wonder and gratitude. My small ritual of burial did not fix anything. It was simply a refusal to let a life pass without acknowledgment.
All of us live under an unrelenting demand for attention. The world presents itself to us as a continuous moral emergency. Every headline asks for outrage, alignment, and response. Everything is politicized. Everything competes for concern. The result is not deeper care but a thinning of it. When everything claims our attention, attention itself begins to fray.
I cannot carry the weight of the world in my hands. No one can. The demand that we do leaves us either numb or performative, loudly invested in everything and truly present to very little. And yet, as the little bird taught me, there is always something at hand—something near enough to be touched, noticed, and honored. Ethics, at its most basic, begins there. Not with grand solutions or total awareness, but with fidelity to what is given in front of us.
I could not stop the illegality and abuse of power I read about Saturday morning. I could not intervene in global affairs. But I could attend to a frozen bird. I could return it to the earth with care. That small act did not distract me from justice. It reminded me why justice matters at all.
Take care,
+Ab. Andy