The Birds Are Singing Peace Today

There they are again – the winter birds perched so assuredly in my forsythia, singing loud, sharing the news of their day – at the top of their tiny lungs.

What I hear is the song of peace.  And it is not a quiet thing.  Quite the contrary: peace is a loud, cacophonous song, with lots of disharmonies.  It’s the sound of safety and joy and that word we Americans love to bandy about: freedom.

Maya Angelou may know why the caged bird sings, but I do not.  For sure I know that the cage changes the song and dampens it – sometimes to the point of invisible silence.

Freedom, I think, is only possible with peace.  We’ve gotten it so often backwards though, espousing this notion that war is the means of peace and that war is the gateway, at a bare minimum, to freedom.

But here’s the thing: in the US, as a mere example of history, we could have fought a revolution and still ended up with tyranny; many before and after have.  That we did not was not the product of war; it was the product of peace: rowdy, boisterous, competitive, shouting-for-attention, compromising, cajoling, negotiating, ultimately agreeing, peace – a peace that granted the space and the freedom to come to such agreement (at least for some – the rest of us would have to wait on the sidelines quite a while for our freedoms to come).

In the Civil Rights movement, all was not joy and light; but the wagers of that effort who were successful waged their efforts in peace.  They were loud; they insisted on being heard.  They sang their song to any and all who would listen and to many who would not.  They did the work – the painstaking, life-risking, long and arduous work – of bringing change to the many who saw no need for it.

And with each footstep, each effort, they got louder and louder and louder.

Peace is a loud thing.

War and tyranny are actually quiet things, coming as they do like the proverbial thief in the night to take away all sacred things, being planned as they are in the back rooms where the light of day seldom shines.  War and tyranny frighten us into silence – that place where we dare not speak lest we say the wrong thing and perish for it.

War is a quiet thing, loud only its exclamation point ending of things.

Peace is a loud thing, shouting the sheer pleasure of its own existence.

The birds are singing peace today.