“We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The terms ‘right wing’ and ‘left wing’ carry a lot of emotional weight today. They have their origins, though, in a concrete description, and in the National Assembly of early modern France.

It was the government of the revolution, meeting in the aftermath of the storming of the Bastille. Their job was to write a new constitution and one of the important issues they needed to settle was whether the king would have a right of veto over the decisions of the assembly.  Those who thought he should sat on the right of the president of the assembly. Those who thought he should not sat on the left.

The terms were used in the newspapers reporting on the legislature, and swiftly came to represent those who wanted to follow tradition–the right, and those who wanted more change–the left.

Fast forward to today, and a number of people have applied the term in a different way. Billy Graham has been quoted as saying that he’s not for the right wing or the left wing, but for the whole bird. Birds need their wings. The wings allow flight, but both are needed. The far extremes of the wings twist and turn according to the position of the bird, this flexibility providing an aerodynamic advantage. Yet all things in balance. The bird needs both wings for lift, both sets of flight feathers. A bird whose wings have been clipped cannot take flight. And the wing does not exist for itself. It exists for the bird.

As a metaphor for community, it works well. Our community is the whole bird. To thrive, it needs both stability–the function of the right–and an openness to new things–the function of the left. Even the extreme wing tips are important: the extreme right can be a brake on change for change’s sake; the extreme left a goad to try new ideas when tradition does not have the answers to never-before-seen conditions and problems. But, for the most part, in a sensible and logical community, left and right, like the wings of a bird, can work together, exchanging information, and coming up with joint strategies to support flight.