J. Courtney Sullivan: Proof

by the news. I'm Ashley Ford. This family ordinarily does not talk about politics, but this campaign in election were different, and that's adding a whole other, thick, viscous layer of stress. Polarization is nothing new in America, and in twenty twenty, between pandemic, the recession, and the coming election, things are getting really tense out there. Even the simple gesture wearing a mosque has become passes on marriages where partners don't

share well the same political views. There is some treacherous times. We are a country divided, and oftentimes that division can be seen within one family. That's j Courtney Sullivan. She's the author of five novels, and her latest Friends and Strangers just hit the New York Times bestseller List. I'm always interested in how are the bigger political and world events sort of playing out in the lives of everyday people. When she turned her attention to America's polarization, her way

into the topic was through birds. Scientists are out with a stark new warning about the disappearance of billions of birds in the US and Canada nine, which works out to almost three billion birds in less than fifty years. Scientists say habitat reduction, pesticides, and cats are the likely

culprits us. In other words, but like all news today, your take on the missing birds likely depends on where you heard about it, Fox or CNN, the New York Times, or the Daily Caller Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson, which got Courtney thinking, you can't know what you are not seeing, And I don't think many people in this country are getting the full picture, including people in our own families.

My oldest, clearest memory dates back to the summer my sister and I turn mine and our mother brought down her mother's copy of the Birds of North America. It was not some child's plaything, but a guide for serious adult enthusiasts, beautiful with hand painted watercolor illustrations. The book was a bribe, and we knew it. It could be ours mine and my sisters if we promised not to fight. Door and I could never get along. We shared the room with the pink wallpaper at the top of the stairs,

and in that room we bickered, we hollered. She tore out a chunk of my hair, and I put a pillow over her face while she slept. But our grandmother's book intrigued us into behaving, at least for a time. We wrote our names inside, right under the spot where she had done the same. She died before we were born. Our mother had told us how she loved the birds, the way they flew free, darting around cows in their pens and pastures, lounging on fence posts, asking nothing of her.

Whenever our mother saw a cardinal through the kitchen window, she'd say it was her mother stopping by to say hello. Dora and I memorize the birds of North America like a book of prayers. Starlings and sparrows and robins, blue jays, blackbirds, and warblers. By September we knew them all on site ever since. Birds are what we have in common, birds and not much else. My sister and I have never lived more than three miles apart, but we've gone whole

years without speaking. Dora started watching what she calls the news after Harold died. Among the things, she now believes that there is a floor at Mercy Hospital just for Mexicans where they get their treatment for free, that Hillary Clinton runs a sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in Washington, DC, That people all over this country are somehow aborting babies after they're born. Last Thanksgiving, she told some whopper and I said that's not true, and

she said it is. I saw it on the news and I said, that's not the news, it's propaganda for people who don't know how to think. She walked right out of my house, then came back in to get the pie she'd brought, and walked out again. I initiated the truce stop talking about it, so we don't have to stop talking king altogether. But even polite conversation, if you make it long enough, comes back around to the question of how to be a person in this world.

I called Dora this morning when I saw the headline, three billion fewer birds on this continent now than fifty years ago, three billion. Reading it felt like reaching the end of a mystery novel and looking back at the clues you missed. Anyone who has lived long enough will tell you it isn't like it used to be. Remember the bats, how they swooped down at sunset? Dora and I have asked one another, Remember bird's song in springtime, so loud you had to cover your ears to think.

Remember when a flow of crows flying overhead would dark in the afternoon sky. Of course, Dora was horrified when I told her about the three billion birds. But when I mentioned, not for the first time, the little Swedish girl demanding that we fix it all now, or else the legacy we leave will be destruction. Dora said, why do you make everything political? Some things just are I hung up on her. I won't be the one to

smooth things over this time either. The city of Des Moines used to be just that, beyond it, farmland punctuated it every here and there by, a tiny town. Now the space between places is full of big box stores and big identical houses. Either on. My grandson and his wife live in I can never remember which driveway is theirs. There are no trees anywhere. The lawns are an unnatural

chemical green cuts short like military haircuts. My grandson's wife sends pictures of deer and wild turkeys wandering lost down the street. I can't miss what you've never seen. Maybe that's why they're not as angry as they should be. Makes me want to chain myself to a bulldozer before they can plow under one more field. Old age has turned me into a radical. Some afternoons, the Cardinal alights on a tree branch outside my kitchen window. It reminds me of my grandmother, my mother on a good day,

Dora too. What will happen when the proof that any of us was ever here only exists between the pages of an old book, the provenance of which no one alive can recall. Then later on not even that that was proof. By j Courtney Sullivan, the narrator with Cindy Catz Hi Courtney Hi Ashley. The first thing I want to say, honestly, it is just damn girl. You start with a story about sisters bonding over birds, but it

very quickly morphs into a story about political polarization. And then you work in our own oblivion right there at the end, and it's about two pages. I'm still recovering. Ah, thank you. One of the things that I love about this story is that the sisters you know, never really did get along, yeah by growing up in the same environment except for this bond over birds, and their political differences actually seem to have a lot more to do

with the media. Dora consumes, how much blame do you put on media for our extreme political polarization in this country? Right now? I want to be fair, you know, fair and balanced, as Fox News would say, And I actually listen to a lot of conservative talk radio and I watch Fox News even though it's probably going to take years off my life, because I want to see what

are both sides saying and what are people hearing. But I really believe this, not just because I am a left leaning individual, but I truly think that Fox News has created so much damage to this culture and continues to do so. And I have conservative people in my own life whom I love, who are very smart, well educated people, and they are still kind of reciting talking points that they hear on Fox News, and it's terrifying

to me. One of the things that I loved about this story, you know, beyond the sisters and their relationship, is the mention of birds. I'll be honest, I'm a bird person, but are you a fellow bird person? When this news story came out about three billion fewer birds for some reason, I was reading the news stories, but I also was reading the comments. They say, never read the comments, but when you didn't write it, you can.

And I was really amazed because there were so many commenters telling stories about the birds of their youth, and one detail in particular, which I think ended up in the story. You know, someone said, remember when the sky would just be darkened by a flock of birds going overhead? And I thought, I've no, I don't remember that. This person is obviously much older than I am. I never

I never saw that. But I think this idea that we can't miss what we don't know exists, we can't miss what we've never seen, is very scary when it comes to issues of animals and the planet in general. You know, you can't fight against what you don't know as a problem. Right when I wrote it, I was living in Brooklyn, and I guess birds weren't a huge part of my life. And we've since moved to the Albany, New York area, which is very green, and we have

so many birds in our yards. Once you start seeing them and seeing the variety, it makes you wonder, you know, what more there might have been to see. It's immeasurable. I think what we lose just by not knowing it was there for us, yes, and not knowing it was there for us to enjoy. Yes. The sisters seem to have suffered a permanent sure in this story, like we don't know if they're ever going to talk to each other again, but don't we need to be talking to

the doors of the world? Like that is the position of quite a few people, is that if we give up on the doras we lose everything. Do you think it's too late for that? Are we too divide it to come back together? I guess I probably have kind of a pessimistic take on this, you know. I do often see this sentiment expressed maybe on Twitter, and you know, the sense of like, if you have these conservative people

in your life, you must convince them. And it's really difficult because personally I have those people in my life, and if you said to my conservative uncle, don't talk to Courtney anymore unless she agrees to vote for Trump. I'm never going to He's never going to convince me. It's really hard because I want to believe that we can talk our way to agreement on a lot of these things. But honestly, I don't believe it. I mean, and that doesn't mean that there aren't important conversations to

be had. You know, in my own family, even there are people who are conservative, but they're young, much younger than I am, and they are reasonable, and I see hope there. I see hope in having conversations with them, because even though they identify as conservative, there's so much common ground and they're not okay with what's happening in

this country in a lot of ways. So to my mind, yes, there are conversations to be had, there's common ground to be found, and there are a lot of people who we shouldn't like, let go of or just say forget it. We're never going to get there. But there are also a lot of people who are just there. They're fully baked, and I don't think we're going to get them, unfortunately, much as they will never get us. We like the truth.

I dare on the Chronicles of Now. We enjoy good Courtney, thank you so much for that story, and thank you for coming on the Chronicles of Now. I've really enjoyed this common versation me too, thank you for having me. You can read my full interview with Jay Courtney Sullivan on our website Chronicles dot Fm, where you can also read the story you just heard and other short fiction

torn from today's headlines. Our sound designer and composer is Bart Warshaw, our producer is Curtis Fox, and our associate producer is Emily Rostick. Tyler Cabott is the executive producer and founder of Chronicles of NAP for Pushkin Industries. Our executive producer is Leetel Malaud. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Carly Migliori, Heather Faine, and Eric Sandler for the Chronicles of Now podcast. I'm Ashley Ford. Thanks for listening.