The footage is remarkable, almost scripted by a sentimental director: a young bald eagle, born in a nest overlooking Big Bear Lake, California, spreads its wings for the first time and launches into the sky. The camera shakes. The onlookers gasp. And in that moment, we are meant to feel hope.
But I am Arthur Penhaligon, and I do not deal in hope. I deal in history. And what I see in this hatchling’s flight is not a simple parable of resilience, but a mirror held up to a declining empire that has forgotten what it means to soar.
Let us set the scene. A young eagle, the national symbol of the United States, takes its first flight in a state that is currently experiencing a political and economic meltdown of almost Roman proportions. California, once the golden frontier, is now a laboratory of social experiment: soaring homelessness, rolling blackouts, wildfires that consume entire towns, and a political class more interested in virtue signalling than in governing. And yet, here is this bird, indifferent to our squabbles, doing what eagles have done for millennia. It is majestic. It is also irrelevant.
Why irrelevant? Because nature’s cycles are eternal; empires are not. The eagle does not care about your identity politics or your carbon credits. It does not know that its home state is contemplating reparations or that its governor is under threat of recall. The bird is pure instinct, pure biology. But we, the humans who clap and post the video, we are something else: a species that has lost its nerve, its unifying myths, its sense of destiny.
Consider the Victorians. When they saw an eagle, they saw empire, hierarchy, and the divine right of the strong. They would draw parallels to the Roman aquila, the standard that legions followed into battle. For them, the eagle was a symbol of conquest and order. Today, we see in the same bird an opportunity for a viral tweet, a moment of collective ‘aww’ that distracts us from the fact that our civilisation is crumbling around us.
We have become decadent. We celebrate the individual’s first flight, but we have abandoned the rigorous training that produces eagles. We have replaced discipline with therapy, duty with self-care, and patriotism with globalist platitudes. The hatchling will learn to hunt, to kill, to dominate its territory. Meanwhile, our children are taught that competition is toxic, that borders are immoral, and that the nation state is a relic.
The irony is delicious. The bald eagle was saved from extinction by the very government that many now despise. The Endangered Species Act, a product of 1970s state power, restored the population. Yet today, the same government is mired in debt and dysfunction. The eagle thrives; the state falters. This is not a contradiction. It is a pattern. When empires decline, nature often reclaims the ruins. The Colosseum is now overgrown with weeds. The eagles of Rome are long dead. But the idea of Rome, its laws, its language, its hubris, echoes still.
So watch the video. Enjoy the clumsy leap, the flapping panic, the eventual glide. But do not let it fool you. That bird’s flight is a distraction from our own failure to launch. We are a people who have confused motion with progress, noise with meaning. The eagle does not need to be ‘resilient’. It is built for resilience. We, on the other hand, are building a society that actively breeds fragility: safe spaces, trigger warnings, and a culture that worships victimhood over victory.
When the Roman Empire fell, the barbarians did not care about eagles. They cared about bread and circuses. We have the circuses. The bread is getting expensive. And somewhere, a young eagle is taking flight, unaware that it is the last symbol of a greatness we no longer deserve.
