I will be a hummingbird

Years ago my kids starting watching videos through the website The Kid Should See This (aka TKSST, highly recommended for everyone, not just kids).

Aside: I sometimes joke that the TKSST videos are educational-ish enough that you will feel okay-ish about your kids watching them all day. Seriously, though, there is a lot of interesting viewing there, curated and organized for your convenience.

One video that struck a chord with me was the animated fable I Will Be a Hummingbird from "Dirt! The Movie". Check out the short video and story (also partially shown in still images and text on TKSST) by clicking on the link or watching the video below.

If you don’t want to watch the video I’ll give you the gist: a hummingbird helps to fight a raging fire, a drop of water at a time. Other animals label the hummingbird’s efforts as insignificant, but the hummingbird is insistent that it is helping in the way that it can.

Remembering the message of the story helped me finally decide to put a Black Lives Matter banner on my website and write about it here.

I know it’s a tiny gesture on an even tinier speck of the internet.

But you’re here with me now, so I’m talking to you. Not trying to convince you of anything. Just letting you know how I feel about it: black lives matter.

For some reason this message hit home most when I saw a take on the “All Lives Matter” response to “Black Lives Matter”. Basically, it was this:

Yes, all lives matter. But all lives can’t matter until black lives matter.

Equality, y’all.

I don’t want to pretend like racism doesn’t affect me.

Putting up a website banner is something I can do to show solidarity. Maybe it will be a stepping stone to other personal action.

Yes, it’s a drop of water on a raging fire, perhaps only significant to me but still significant in that it is something rather than nothing.

I didn’t want to live with nothing anymore.

Thank you for reading.