Dead Canaries Everywhere

Could be the first line of a poem, but I saw it on a tee-shirt someone wore to the NO KINGS/VOTE EARLY rally. It caught my attention as a cool shirt, but beyond that I got the message.

When I had my first apartment, back in the day, for reasons I can no longer recall, I had a tall gold cage on the back porch--home to a

https://youtube.com/shorts/iIb6znCLkOc?si=KYfibMYMjG5mQmwO

tiny, beautiful, bright yellow singer that never rested from morning til night. A cover over the cage was the only way to silence that voice...until he died.

"Canaries in the coal mine" were a tried and true method that miners penetrating deep into the dark earth relied on to save their very lives. If the canaries stopped singing their constant trill, the silence was an early warning of poisonous, odorless gas in the mine. While vital, thankfully since the 1980's, the birds have been replaced by electronic gas detectors. The imagery, however, remains embedded in the phrase that speaks of imminent danger.

"Dead canaries everywhere" takes it to a level appropos of the many fault lines that lie just beneath the surface of society now and into the future. Warning signs are everywhere, like dead canaries.

Right before our eyes, a shifting world order has historians sounding the alarm while melting glaciers have been the rallying cry of environmentalists for decades. I know of someone who took an Antarctica cruise and said he could stick out his glass for a bit of ice for his drink! Gauche as that sounds, think how hard it is to get an icecube out of an icetray--like mining for coal with a pickaxe. A melting glacier is apparently more like slush while a power play in geopolitics is destabilizing life everywhere for everyone.

There are many more warning signs flashing that cautionary yellow, like the canary, but just like running a yellow traffic light in the knick of time, a fraction of a minute too late creates chaos and possible death. We ignore that flashing yellow warning at our own peril.

Young activists everywhere are rising up to say STOP! They sense the poisonous gas eminating from so-called leaders without a moral compass who want to take us deeper into a very dark place. The more those in power try to snuff out the bright yellow bird's uplifting song, the louder its warning is heard by people everywhere.

"It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings", as they say, so let's heed the warning while there's still time to do something about the gasbags poisoning our lives without care for anyone but those in their own gilded cages. VOTE! VOTE Early!