Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return
by: Mary Oliver
Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if
you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say
hello, hello, and are we not
of one family, in our delight of life?
You sing, I listen.
Both are necessary
if the world is to continue going around
night-heavy then light-laden, though not
everyone knows this or at least
not yet,
or, perhaps, has forgotten it
in the torn fields,
in the terrible debris of progress.
Progress is not always a good thing. Vaccines for deadly diseases, good progress. Building condos and hotels that obliterate unencumbered views of Lake Superior, bad progress. Electing a woman to be President of the United States, good progress. Changing the recipe for Coca Cola, bad progress.
Of course, defining progress as "good" or "bad" is wholly subjective. One person's progress is another person's environmental disaster. I'm lucky. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, about 20 miles from the shores of Lake Superior. As a kid, I didn't have to worry too much about stranger danger. There weren't drug dealers on the school playground, and school shootings were still anomalies, not daily occurrences. I grew up in a much simpler time than my children. When my mom and dad were schoolkids, they had to deal with the effects of the Great Depression and World War II. Not simpler.
I was a child of the 1980s. Good and bad progress were a little different back then. For example, one of the greatest scandals of my young life was the exposure of Milli Vanilli as frauds. My generation had Michael Jackson's Thriller, not Michael Jackson's child molestation trial. When a famine struck the continent of Africa, Quincy Jones organized "We Are the World." Instead of COVID, the '80s saw the AIDS epidemic. Ronald Reagan cut social funding and welfare programs in the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev inched the Soviet Union closer to democracy.
Since my middle and high school days, there have been some amazing advancements in technology and medicine and society. An HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence. Practically everyone on the planet walks around with tiny supercomputers in their back pockets. The Jetsons almost seems like an animated reality show from 2023 these days. So-called progress has been made.
However, the human race has fucked up a lot of things, as well, starting with the environment. Every morning this last week, the sun has risen orange because of wildfires in Canada. Disease forecasters estimate that there is a 27% chance of another global pandemic in the next ten years. (These forecasters aren't crystal ball gazers--they're scientists and physicians.) And Donald Trump still isn't in prison for inciting political insurrection, let alone for all the women he's raped.
As I said earlier, progress is subjective. The fact that most people now realize that Saving Private Ryan should have won Best Picture instead of Shakespeare in Love is a step forward in my book. The fact that some people think there are nanobots in COVID vaccines, five steps backward in my book. I wish there were clear and easy ways to track progress. Ones that everyone can acknowledge and accept. Unfortunately, that isn't a realistic goal for humankind because we have free will and, therefore, can choose to be willfully stupid or ignorant.
Mary Oliver has the best answer here: listen to the meadowlarks sing and realize that we are of one family with them. What makes them sing in delight should make us sing, too. What kills them, kills us. We just need to stop this terrible degree of progress shit and listen to what the meadowlarks (and, therefore, the planet) are telling us.
Another sign of progress: Saint Marty turned on the air conditioning last night. (Good progress or bad--you decide.)
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