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Everyone assumed it would be the most lopsided war in history.
Professional soldiers, armed with machine guns, set out to destroy thousands of flightless birds.
But things didn’t go quite as smoothly as everyone imagined.
In November 1932, wheat farmers in the Campion district of Western Australia realized they had a problem. An emu problem. As many as 20,000 of the huge birds had migrated towards their fields in search of food. The emus ravaged the grain and knocked down fences that had effectively kept out other pests, such as rabbits.
Reeling from the global Great Depression, the farmers petitioned their government to step in to save their harvests.
We’ve got this, elected officials declared. Members of the Royal Australian Artillery were given World War I-era machine guns and told to blast their feathery targets to smithereens – a task that would surely take only a few days.
What nobody expected was the resilience and creativity of the birds.
Although they had no military training (at least, that we know of), the emus proved to be elusive targets. At six-feet-tall, they appeared to be sitting ducks. But they quickly learned to “post a guard” – typically described by the soldiers as “a big, black-plumed bird” – that alerted the others to the approach of hostile humans.
Then they would scatter, running up to 30 mph, not in a large cluster but in small groups, reminiscent of guerrilla warfare tactics. The soldiers had been given 10,000 rounds of ammunition – more than enough, they assumed – but they were only able to bring down a few dozen emus.
The soldiers decided to mount a machine gun on a truck. But the birds’ escape routes were so unpredictable that the driver had a hard time keeping them in sight.
For more than a month, the emus demonstrated an astonishing degree of agility. They seemingly coordinated their movements to frustrate their pursuers at every turn.
A few weeks before Christmas, the government caved. The war was over. The soldiers reported that they had suffered no casualties – apart, that is, from their dignity.
When Australians learned that their leaders hadn’t “got this” after all, and that trained soldiers had been unable to defeat an army of determined birds, the Great Emu War became something of an international embarrassment. It remains a source of amusement to this day.
As the historians of the website Scientific Origin put it, “The Great Emu War has since become an infamous episode in military and ecological history. It is often cited as an example of the unpredictable consequences of human intervention in nature…. Today, it serves as a reminder that nature can sometimes outsmart even the most advanced human technologies.”
So, what happened to the farmers’ wheat over the following century? The farmers wisely chose to invest in better fences.
And the emus? After dwindling almost to extinction, they are now thriving again under Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999.
Here we should mention that in 2019, American television viewers were introduced to a CGI-generated emu named LiMu who, with his bumbling human sidekick Doug, has starred in dozens of commercials for Liberty Mutual Insurance. They all end with a mindless jingle that I will not repeat for fear of getting it stuck in your head the rest of the day.
“You got this” has become a popular word of encouragement in recent years.
According to sociologists, it’s become associated with a culture of “toxic positivity” – never-ending attempts to convince others, as well ourselves, that we are always in control of circumstances and will always come out on top if we just keep working and dreaming.
But that’s simply not true. We are rarely in control of anything in our lives, and trying harder only proves the futility of self-effort.
Kate Bowler, an author, young mom, and cancer survivor, points out that “the writings of the saints are full of commands to ‘let go’ and to submit yourself to what seems to be the will of the Almighty. All of American culture and pop psychology scream against that. Never give up on your dreams! Just keep knocking, that door is about the open! Think positively! Self-improvement guaranteed!! The entire motivational-speaking industry rests on the assumption that you can have what you want, you can be what you want. Just do it.”
But the Christ-following life is not an invitation to “make it to the top” through spiritual self-achievement.
It’s an invitation to a joyful awareness of God’s presence by surrendering to the One who’s really in control.
“Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving” (Ephesians 2:8-9, The Message).
When it comes to the most important things in life, you don’t got this.
And that’s all right – for the simple reason that God has things well in hand.
Any opinion to the contrary is definitely for the birds.