Lost Causes

 

Friend Xerxes writes of his efforts to feed a hummingbird stranded in the BC interior during the recent severe temperatures. He tried keeping his hummingbird feeder operational with various heating options. But eventually the hummingbird stopped coming. No doubt it froze to death.

Nevertheless, Xerxes concludes that such “lost causes” are worth pursuing.

I disagree. Realistically, unless he could trap it and bring it inside, that hummingbird was going to freeze to death. In the course of nature, most hummingbirds die in their first year. So what did he hope to accomplish? It seems to me Xerxes was not being noble, but only indulging his whimsy. More cruelly, I might accuse him of trying to play God.

You might accuse me of just not caring about animals. I do—I am a committed vegetarian, have been for going on thirty years.

But unreasonable, purely sentimental concern for animals can be a cheap way to feel virtuous. Xerxes’s actions did little or nothing to benefit the hummingbird; only his image of himself. Jung once observed (paraphrasing from memory) that “sentimentality is a superstructure concealing brutality. “ Hitler himself was a dog lover and a vegetarian.

Because God made all creatures great and small, all is good. Evil exists simply as an inversion of values: a lesser good treated as a greater good. 

Such efforts invested in the hummingbird look like an example of this. It is putting hummingbirds before humans. There is something wrong when you expend so much effort on a doomed bird at the same time the same weather is causing homeless to freeze on the streets in East Vancouver. Close enough to Xerxes that he can hardly be unaware. 

One might object that we pay taxes to take care of that. But the fact that there are homeless demonstrates that the government is not, in fact, taking care of that.

One might object that these people are addicts. They are responsible for their own predicament, and they will just use any money to buy drugs or alcohol.

Some are addicts; many are mentally ill, abandoned by the system, who cannot take care of themselves. Many are adolescents fleeing abusive families. With the current cost of housing, their numbers are growing.

It is not a time to be playing with hummingbirds and lost causes.