The Finches

THE FINCHES

Once finches were all very different from each other.
Not so long ago, one could travel the globe and encounter an astounding variety of them. Their songs charmed the listener with ceaseless invention. While the range of colors they displayed appeared inexhaustible. The very pattern of their lives changed from one land to another. In truth, observing the finches was an unending series of discoveries and amazements that enriched any observer’s appreciation of the grand diversity life celebrated.
In what seemed a very short time, however, all that changed. Finches everywhere began looking, sounding, and acting increasingly alike. So marked was this transmutation, they became the poster birds, as it were, for a strange embrace of “global identicalism.” Social media, online blog posts, and Op-Ed pieces in leading newspapers asserted that universal connectivity was the new normal and cited lookalike finches at opposite points on the globe as proof that uniformity was an unstoppable force at all levels. Some “global identicalism” experts made quite a reputation being interviewed about how the finches demonstrated “an evolution from the old internationalism as an accommodation of differences to the new internationalism as an endorsement of borderless uniformity, with all the advantages to be expected of that evolution.”
Predictions were legion that within no time every facet of finch life anywhere would be governed by a single definition. The advantage of this advance for the finches themselves was hard to dispute. All of them having become essentially indistinguishable in thought and action, they had no difficulty adapting to each other’s environments. “Fitting in” regardless of location or circumstances ceased to be a problem.
For that matter, there wasn’t really much need for migrating from one place to another anymore. With every finch in the world soon to be indistinguishable from every other, there was obviously less reason to think a change of locale would reveal anything new, as had long been a goal of travel, or require any adjustment in behavior or self-awareness when you arrived.
And yet, curiously, the more the finches came to be mere copies of each other in even the smallest detail, the more they clung to what they believed was unique in themselves. The more individual and diverse, in fact, they proclaimed themselves to be.
“Regardless of how much we may look alike or sound alike or act alike,” they confidently insisted, “we’re not the same at all.”
Apparently they believed you could have it both ways in “global identicalism.”