It was the late 1960s and the country singer, whose toilet I once graced, found himself in a bit of a pickle. The Vietnam War was raging and the American troubadour was having trouble balancing his Southern, pro-military, patriotic personal brand with his increasing realization, along with most of the country, that this conflict was senseless, killing Americans who didn’t have to die, and it needed to end. Would he continue the kayfabe, projecting one story publicly while inwardly believing another?
In a soul-searching pilgrimage, he packed his bags and traveled to Vietnam to sing to the troops. Not only did he sing, he slept among them, ate among them. Like them, he heard the sounds of bombs and people dying in the distance.
While there, a reporter approached Cash and asked, “Johnny, why are you here? Are you a dove? Or are you a hawk?”
During that time, those who considered themselves to be pro-peace coined themselves “doves,” while those who were for the war were known as hawks. Here’s how Johnny responded to the question of whether singing for the troops made him one or the other:
Somebody said, “That makes you a hawk, doesn’t it?”
No, no that don’t make me a hawk. But I said if you watch the helicopters bring in the wounded boys, and then you go into the wards and sing for ‘em and try and do your best to cheer ‘em up, so they can come back home, it might make you a dove with claws.
Cash’s answer was a poetic, non-dualistic image that for me conjures the likes of Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and St. Nicholas (not the commercialized version of Santa, but the real Greek who is known to have dropped gold coins through a father’s window anonymously by night to save his daughters from slavery and stood in the way of a sword to protect three innocent men from execution).
“A dove with claws” is a metaphor for the kind of tough, gritty, unrelenting kindness we need to navigate a future that would rather keep us waring against one another.
Evolving (vs. Suppressing) Our Instincts
“Instead of ignoring some of our most human instincts or indulging them in dehumanizing conflicts, perhaps they need a new Everest to climb.”
Notice that Cash’s statement doesn't exclude the fight in him. So many of our conversations today around kindness and empathy are really more concerned with niceness (a banal, neutral, face-saving stand-in for kindness), as if that primal, evolutionary instinct we possess to conquer something, to overcome an object in our way, simply isn’t there anymore, that it has somehow evaporated.
Instead of ignoring some of our most human instincts or indulging them in dehumanizing conflicts, perhaps they need a new Everest to climb. Perhaps our evolution looks like doves with claws.
Hear me out.
Do you want to win a war in the age of constant digital distractions and increasing isolation? Win the war of Intimacy. Fight to know the fellow members of your species, those whose ordinary, flesh and blood presence alone justifies their kinship with you. Fight also to be known by them. Conjure up the courage to tell them how you feel, and have the discipline to listen long and hard enough when others do the same to you. That’s the battle of the twenty-first century, the war of the worlds infiltrated by polarizing filters and cold-blooded algorithms.
Poets Will Save Us…If We Let Them.
“What does a dove with claws looks like? It looks like a poet, someone who can help connect with the physicality of the earth we inhabit, awakening our senses and reorienting our emotions while pushing us to question, doubt, wrestle—in a word, fight.”
Shortly after Johnny Cash announced that he might be a “dove with claws,” he was invited to perform at a concert for President Nixon at the White House. There Cash retold the story about him and the reporter. He then began to strum the chords to a new song he had just written, a gutsy one considering his audience, one that touched on the needless deaths associated with war, the incongruity of that fact with “the golden rule” America claims to value, all wrapped in a simple question, the song’s title: “What Is Truth?”
Don’t miss it.
Don’t miss the chosen medium and its message. Cash took a moment in history when everyone was questioning what truth was…and wrote a poem.
What does a dove with claws looks like? It looks like a poet, someone who can help connect with the physicality of the earth we inhabit, awakening our senses and reorienting our emotions while pushing us to question, doubt, wrestle—in a word, fight.
Throughout history, poets have brought meaning, hope, order, and a sense of soul to any culture to which they’ve belonged. They’ve always been the ones responsible for ensuring that their culture doesn’t dissolve into a mass of drones, compliant and controllable at the hands of an enemy. Even if a culture succumbed to captivity, it was the poet who worked to keep the flame of that culture alive, secured deep in the hearts of the community, in the imaginations of its children.
The necessary next step for our 21st century culture, a culture of digital natives and immigrants, is to raise a generation of digital poets—those who have mastered the skills of empathy and imagination to express something eloquently, courageously, and truthfully.
What if our greatest invitation, our most imperative directive for this unprecedented time was to help the next generation navigate it by becoming radically kind, fierce creatures, by becoming doves with claws?
The Age of the Digital Poet
“It will take systems listening to them, investing in them, and collaborating with them on wide-scale solutions NOW to ensure their work has enough time and bandwidth to reach everyone in society, including the most vulnerable.”
Looking out at the horizon, where the twenty-first century meets the twenty-second, I see hope. As machines offer to take over the lion’s share of both our work and free time, as we’re persuaded to spend more of our waking hours “plugged into the Matrix,” there will come an eventual tipping point. Poets, those skilled in the once forgotten art of being ordinary, who can remind us of our humanity and the attributes that separate us from machines, will be in extremely high demand. Institutions from governments and classrooms to cubicles and factory floors will need experts trained to help us propagate peace, maintain physical and mental balance, exercise empathy, and resolve our duels. Before the twenty-first century, these services were viewed as ancillary amenities, even luxuries. But if the events that mark the turn of a new millennium—hyperpolitical polarization, worker burnout, or the rise of suicide and self-harm—are indicators of what’s to come, the clock is ticking faster than ever before.
Unfortunately, without intentional leadership and education, without the urgent and vocal intervention of us, the elders of our culture, it’s easy to imagine how this can all mudslide into another inequitable data point. Only the highest earners would be able to afford the kind of contemplative, mindful recalibration required to thrive in the twenty-first century, with their children being the only ones able to access the kind of learning necessary to think conceptually, critically, and empathetically, thus gaining a competitive edge.
The good news is that the overwhelming need for reforms to the issues just mentioned means the age of the digital poet is now upon us. It will take systems listening to them, investing in them, and collaborating with them on wide-scale solutions now to ensure their work has enough time and bandwidth to reach everyone in society, including the most vulnerable, if not for moral reasons, then at least for the sake of our collective sustainability.
More than that, it will take a populace of ordinary people like you and me redirecting our value to different places than where we’ve invested it.
The only way to create a dove with claws is to become a dove with claws.