It was lying in the street, rocking gently with the turns of a placid wind. At first I thought it was some bit of detritus set free by a garbage truck, the driver hurrying to complete his rounds before the temperature reached that day’s brutal high. By the time I got close enough to see that it wasn’t any sort of trash at all, the wind had lifted it and tossed it into our yard: a blue jay’s tail feather, newly molted.
In late summer, many resident songbirds undergo a full molt, leaving behind their old, battered feathers and growing gleaming new ones in their place. The new feathers will be needed to offer the best insulation against the cold in winter, and to make the bird’s best case for a mate come spring. The blue jay this feather once belonged to was already in the process of gaining a shiny new version of itself.
But the time between old feathers and new is hard for birds. They feel bad. They’re cross with one another. Blue jays and cardinals, especially, tend to lose many feathers at once. Sometimes they spend a few weeks completely bald. A bird without a full set of feathers is vulnerable. During the molt, they keep quiet and close to the shadows.
I left the blue jay feather where I found it last week. In nature, someone always makes use of what someone else doesn’t need. Another creature will use it to line a nest or a burrow.
I carried that feather with me all week in other ways, though. As with Wordsworth, the world has been too much with me lately, and I welcomed the reminder of the blue jay’s world. Though threatened, at least some things in nature are still timeless, proceeding exactly as they should. I wish I could say the same of us.
In our world, just days after a 14-year-old is alleged to have killed four people in Apalachee High School in Georgia and wounded nine others, a 6-year-old in Memphis brought a loaded gun to school, passing it around for classmates to handle. Days after that, schools were closed in southern Kentucky while authorities searched for an assailant who shot five strangers driving on Interstate 75. In the 25 years since the massacre at Columbine High School, advocates for common-sense gun laws have been indefatigable, their ranks continually growing, yet here we are again.
The threats reportedly made beforehand by both the Georgia shooter and the fugitive in Kentucky weren’t enough to save their innocent victims here in the gun-soaked American South. “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security,” the Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, said in response to the Georgia shooting. “But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.” A reality that his party has no intention of remedying.
Meanwhile, over on the reputedly liberal side of the country, California is taking advantage of a June Supreme Court ruling that permits cities to ban outdoor sleeping and remove homeless encampments. Around here, we’re familiar with this kind of law: In 2022, Tennessee became the first state to make sleeping on public property a felony. What does it say about the current state of the United States of America that one of the few things still uniting us is a willingness to criminalize poverty?
Even when a low-income family is on the path to homeownership — if they have the help of a nonprofit like Habitat for Humanity, say, or if they are living in homes their parents or grandparents paid for — they can still be in danger of foreclosure because insurance premiums keep going up as climate calamities keep bearing down. So this is where we are: People can’t afford rent, and they can’t afford insurance on a house they own, and they’ll go to jail if they sleep outdoors.
Sometimes I don’t know how to keep believing in the possibility of justice — true justice, I mean, not the parody of justice the current Supreme Court keeps dishing out — when problems like gun violence and homelessness and the climate emergency, among so many other deep, systemic injustices, seem utterly intractable. How does a person maintain enough hope to believe that change is possible when nothing ever seems to change?
In my lowest moments, I look to the people who have devoted their lives to pursuing change anyway. I look to the gun-sense advocates pressing for laws that will keep children safe in schools, to the believers who pray outside prisons on execution days, to all the conservation organizations fighting to hold governments accountable for protecting the earth. Most of all, I look to Charlie Strobel, who died last year after giving his life to God and to the unhoused.
In her foreword to “The Kingdom of the Poor,” a memoir by Father Strobel that will be published Tuesday by Vanderbilt University Press, Ann Patchett recalls that her friend’s ordination card was printed with the words of Robert Kennedy: “Few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”
That’s just what Father Strobel did. Over the years, he managed to bring his congregation, and then his diocese, and then his whole city to an understanding of what we owe to our unhoused neighbors. Last month, Nashville opened its first permanent housing development for the homeless. In addition to furnished studio apartments, it offers addiction treatment, mental health support and job counseling. The facility is named Strobel House.
When I feel helpless at the thought of all the seemingly unsolvable problems our species faces, I remind myself of the political vicissitudes Father Strobel weathered in his quiet quest for justice over more than five decades of service. Mayors came and went, governors came and went, Tennessee shifted from solid blue to a sea of red, but Charlie Strobel never wavered. Cot by cot and peanut butter sandwich by peanut butter sandwich, he fed his homeless neighbors and gave them a safe place to sleep. And he taught us to do the same.
I thought of Father Strobel again last week when I saw that blue jay’s feather in the grass. Birds lose their old feathers at the end of summer, but even as the old feathers drop, new ones are already growing.
Those birds feel awful, as I sometimes do, as we all sometimes do. But a change is coming — for them and perhaps for us. Even when the prospect of transformation seems very far from certain, I remind myself to keep faith with that possibility, to work toward making it a reality: A change is coming. Surely, someday, a change is coming.
The post One Blue Feather. A Changed World? appeared first on New York Times.
