9/21/25

THE COLLIE & THE CROW
Raising again, our enduring, elusive vision of an America united.

MEEKO AND RUSSELL, border collie and crow, in their Oregon backyard. PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn Buck, via the Washington Post

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE QUIRKY ANIMAL STORIES meant to distract us from the despair and distress of the normal news. And, now, in today's harsh political moment, it's especially welcome.
     The border collie and the crow. The bird and the dog. Fast friends in the grassroots of the American Northwest.
     Maybe you saw the story in last week’s Washington Post.
     A young crow was injured this past June when its nest fell from an 80-foot-tall tree into the backyard of Autumn Buck and her husband, Tedd Simmons, in Portland, Oregon.
     Autumn and Tedd fashioned a homemade nest for the crow, raising it six feet from the ground, and then feeding their young patient typical hospital gruel: mashed bananas and soggy kibble.
     Enter Meeko, the couple’s 5-year-old border collie. With no sheep to superintend, Meeko took charge of recovery nest security, chasing away errant cats and standing guard. 
     The bird – now Christened “Russell” after the actor, Russell Crowe – healed, getting back use of his land legs, then learning fly.
     In the meantime, a bond between bird and dog evolved and matured.
     Russell took to sleeping on Meeko’s tail. 
     They played fetch: somebody would throw a tiny crocheted “cake;” Russell would grab it, then drop it for Meeko to retrieve. Toss Meeko a Frisbee, and Russell raced to get there first. They played “chase.” Together, they greeted the mail carrier. And in their spare time, they just hung out.
     In the morning, the crow, who slept in a chestnut tree, would come to a glass door of the house, persistently pecking at the glass  demanding that Meeko be let out to play.

REALLY? DID THIS HAPPEN? Is the story true? Sound too good?
     Reasonable questions, and mine, too. Autumn Buck, as you can see if you can access the Post  story, supplied the newspaper with bird-dog photo;  and there's even some video of the duo in action.
     But in today’s untamed and unreliable internet, now made even less reliable by fast-evolving artificial intelligence, who knows?
     I’m choosing to believe it. Border collies are protective; crows are among the world's smartest birds.
     But as far as seeing the tale as a cutesy, escapist story, I see it as a modern Aesop’s Fable, a parable about America’s long and continuing aspiration to become a nation for all of us.

GETTING ALONG IS ACTUALLY A BIBLICAL CONCEPT.
      It's that lion lying down with the lamb business. The actual wording is from the Book of Isaiah, 11-6:

     The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

OF COURSE, THERE ARE THE COUNTRY'S FOUNDING DOCUMENTS
     The Declaration of Independence put it this way in 1775:

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

THE MOST MOVING AND ENDURING STATEMENT of American unity comes from Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which, on Aug. 28, 1963, defined the civil rights movement.

     I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
* * *
     I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day, right down in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and
brothers. 
     I have a dream today.

     A little more than four years later, King was assassinated, perhaps as much as punishment and rejection for his vision, as from the impact of his murder’s bullet.

ANOTHER MAN NAMED KING took up the theme more that two decades later.
     Rodney Glen King wondered why people from different backgrounds and viewpoints couldn’t see eye to eye.
     King had been stopped by Los Angeles police for drunk driving and was videotaped as he was savagely beaten. Officers were charged, never convicted, and that outcome produced six days of riots, in which 63 people were killed.
     On May 1, 1992, Rodney King made a TV appeal that the rioting stop:
     
     I just want to say – you know – can we, can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?
* * *
     It's just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again. And, I mean, please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along. We just gotta. We gotta. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's, you know, let's try to work it out. Let's try to beat it, you know. Let's try to work it out. 

     Rodney King, who had confronted substance abuse throughout his life, drowned in his swimming pool in 2012, his death ruled accidental,  with drugs and alcohol said to be contributing factors.

THE UNITY THEME WAS PICKED UP AGAIN, when Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, addressed the Democratic National Convention in Boston, July 27, 2004.
     In his version of a common community, Obama rejected political, racial and cultural divisions.

     . . .  there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.
     There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America. 
     The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. 
     But I've got news for them, too: We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the Red States. 

     The speech propelled Obama into the presidency, the first person of color to hold the nation’s highest office.     Obama served two terms, from 2009 to 2017. And it seemed as if Obama’s vision and those of the two Kings and of the Bible’s prophets, and  of  the Founders, finally had been realized.
     My opinion is the opposite – that America could not countenance a Black man in the White House, and savagely, that formed the basis for Donald Trump, a racist, to be elected president. Twice.
     Trump, a man of unbounded hatred, now is tearing the country to pieces by setting all of us apart – Black, White, girl, boy, liberal, conservative, red state, blue state, rich, poor, college graduate, high school graduate, urban, rural, Native American, immigrant American.
     Never have we been more divided since the Civil war, and maybe the divisions today are even deeper than during a period when our differences were so profound: slave versus free man/woman. 
     But I also think the prophecy, the dream, the vision, the plea for unity will live on until they become a fact, in practice as well as in principle. 
     We can get along. Our superficial differences do not define us. At a time of environmental collapse, in fact, we creatures have the same interest in our mutual survival, and more in common, than our remarkable differences.
     I mean, if the bird and the dog, the collie and the crow,  can do it, why can't the rest of us do the same?