Summer visitors

A flash of red outside the bathroom window caught my eye, a beautiful male cardinal.  I watched him land in a raggedy old pine tree, and there above him sat a brilliant yellow Baltimore Oriole, the first I’ve seen this summer, although I’ve heard them.  The cardinals are here all year, color relief in the black and white winter landscape.  But the orioles are summer visitors, a few of the tourists of the avian world.  The woods are full of bird song in the summer, bringing sounds of the south to join our year round residents.  Sound in the summer is a richer mix, not just the birds, but the chatter of chipmunks out of hibernation and the deep throated twanging of frogs out of brumation.  The clicking of bare branches is replaced by the swish of leaves catching the wind.

A couple of crows were calling back and forth across the woods.  Perhaps they were complaining about all the noise of the summer visitors, the competition for worms and grubs, the showy colors of the bird tourists.  But probably that was my projection, dealing with tourists in the human summer.  We do complain a little about the seasonal difficulty of parking downtown and the drivers who don’t know how to navigate our narrow streets.  Jay has suggested that they could just stay home and send us their money.  But really, they’re as welcome as the orioles and grosbeaks. If a town is going to have tourists, baseball tourists are about the best.

Our tourists come to celebrate our shared past, that time after the Civil War tore us apart and before states were red or blue.  There are plenty of baseball caps in town, but I haven’t seen a MAGA hat.  There seems to be an unspoken agreement that here we’ll just be Americans, having a good time, watching our kids play baseball, eating hot dogs, sitting on the grass listening to concerts.  Summer in Cooperstown is a reminder of the pleasures and pride we share.  On the Fourth of July weekend here, with the town full of visitors from all over the country, it’s possible to imagine a united country.

The League of Women Voters here is getting ready to envision what we can do to maintain and deepen that sense of being one country in the little communities we serve.  Our DNA is civic education, and I expect that will be our focus.  Our challenge is to create events that appeal to people across the political spectrum, that bring us together for learning about our history, our government, our hopes for the future.  We need to set aside political parties and individual candidates and focus on issues and ideas.  And the League is uniquely qualified to do that, with over 100 years of practice.  One big challenge is getting people to believe us when we say we’re non-partisan, because the very idea of being non-partisan seems to have become an oxymoron.  But we see it in the streets of Cooperstown during the summer, as people from all over the country come together to celebrate baseball and their heroes of every race whose political orientation they neither know nor care about. Our summer visitors remind us that party affiliation doesn’t have to define us or separate us.  

I can’t do much to impact the insanity in the big world, but I can be part of regrowing a healthy civil society here.  If we’re going to become the one nation with liberty and justice for all we have dreamed of for 250 years, I think the transformation out of our current division will start in small communities – whether rural or urban – where people know each other as neighbors, not as enemies, where we share the joys of summer and welcome the visitor.