NOVEMBER 17, THURSDAY

BLIND BLUE JAY FURY

A blue jay regularly appears at my side window over looking the Swannanoa Valley. He perches on a bare branch three feet from the the window, sees a blue jay in the mirror of the window and flies forward, claws outstretched and attacks it with his beak. The blue jay thuds against the window, bounces off and flutters back to the bare branch where it sees a blue jay in the mirror of the window and attacks it again.

Obviously the blue jay isn’t being rational nor does it seem to learn anything from the experience. After ten or fifteen lunges it gives up and flies away. But I know that within an hour it will be back, repeating the whole fifteen lunge process.

I don’t think that the blue jay is probably otherwise irrational, totally nuts. Most of the time it flits around quite naturally, avoiding danger and looking for food or companionship. No, there is something about the presence of another blue jay in its territory that induces such rage that he has to attack it, and attack it, again and again.

I don’t see any great revelation here. I don’t know what is going on. But I do see people responding again and again, blindly, driven by some threat to their identity that enrages them and makes them reflexively strike back. And even while this usually causes no change at all in the world around them, the next time they are threatened they will feel sudden rage and attack again.

It is not their human mirror image that infuriates them, but it is some deep inner visceral feeling of threat that they project out on people who are simply walking past minding their own business, business that seems to be a threat, or are living out their own projections of what blindly threatens them, that the aggrieved person sees as a threat.

And sometimes this fury does hurt or even destroy perceived threats in a mass killing or an attempt to cancel them out. But this doesn’t seem to resolve the fury and often seems to heighten rather than lesson the threat the person feels because there is now more reason to be attacked back, more of a threat.

How much of the blue jay’s blind, unstoppable, strike back inner drive do we have embedded in us through evolution that makes us act as we do? And how do we quiet it enough to listen and wonder why the other person feels as he does before blindly striking back?