March 14 Friday roundup

This week’s “Next Comes What” podcast episode asks what the point of protest is, as well as laying out why the #TeslaTakedown movement is such an effect form of it. I run through several examples of protest other than demonstrating. (Some of them don’t even require you to show up in public!) You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Some of you may have seen this photo on Bluesky already, where I posted it yesterday. In 2019, a friend found a baby thrush in the woods near his house. It was injured, lying on the ground, and near death. There was no visible nest nearby, and no parents returned to look for it. Having years of professional experience with wildlife, he took it home and nursed it back to health, feeding it until it was able to fly. At which point, it took off.

The following year, in the first weeks of the pandemic, a nest appeared atop a storage shelf on his porch. This had never happened before.

It was a perfect nest. It belonged to a thrush, he noticed. Then it struck him that this was the same bird from the year before, the one he’d nursed. After the nest was fully constructed, he waited until the thrush flew away and took this picture. Inside were five beautiful eggs.

All of which is to say that while he was nursing the chick, he never would have guessed that a pandemic would soon arrive, and that the creature would return the following year in the darkest moments of the shutdown, bringing comfort to him. Or that his porch would become a nesting place for its clutch of eggs. Or that those birds would in time be able to set out on their own.

This week, I talked a lot about protest and mentioned the importance of being strategic over time, of developing specific asks. And it is critical for a group to make demands as part of the political process. Knowledge without action or power cannot change an unjust system.

Yet as I’ve said before, existence is not zero sum. Everything I do for my own purposes doesn’t automatically harm to someone else or cost them anything. A good outcome happening to another living creature is often good for all of us.

And sometimes, as an individual, you can just choose to do a generous thing because it brings you joy or because it’s the right thing to do, even if it has no strategic purpose, even if you don’t know whether it will make a difference in the long run. If we manage to exit this national—this global—crisis, it will be because of a lot of strategic action plus a million small acts of generosity that have no guarantee of leading to anything else. So when in doubt, do the kind thing, do what you can to bring joy to yourself and others, and—after checking with wildlife experts, if we’re being literal here—feed the baby bird.

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