Today’s the first day of spring and I welcome it with all of my heart. Every year at this time when the birds start their early morning singing, I get excited about it. Lately they’ve almost been loud enough to drown out the drumbeat of tragedy. Almost loud enough, but not quite.
Like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” it seems I can make out the thumping of hatred as it drones below the chirps of cardinals and robins outside my window. Whether it manifests itself as a breakaway from the European Union, as a wall at a nation’s border, as automatic weapon fire in a place of worship or as the tapping on a phone’s keyboard that sends out insulting, juvenile messages of contempt from the “leader of the free world,” the beat continues.
Good grief, but we need spring this year. We need the fresh green of new leaves to overpower the reddened face of anger. We need the emergence of daffodil-yellows to distract from the grey clouds of weapon fire. We need the full, rich spectrum of bright tulips’ diverse colors to overcome the deadly pallor of white nationalism.
Most of all, we need leadership that nurtures the branching, the budding and the leafing out of love. But that may be too much to expect from a trunk that’s grown out of a root system deriving its nourishment from hate, disdain and resentment.
Nevertheless, today I’ll listen for sweet songs and for the trills of bright chirps. We’ve had springs that overcame much worse in the past. Maybe we can train our ears to hear the less bombastic heartbeats of springtime’s feathered heralds. They certainly deserve a higher position in the pecking order than creatures who tweet in time to a tell-tale heart’s drumbeat.
