American Unity Card

A card about healing divides, especially if you're reaching out to those who may have had a different opinion about this and other elections than yourself. The bird is a painstakingly recreated Passenger Pigeon, at the time of our founding the most numerous bird in America, and some believe, the world, possibly even of all time. We hunted it into extinction in a hundred+ years, and the last one, a female named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914, fittingly just after the beginning of the First World War, which began the modern era. The pigeon symbolizes the ideals of the founders and the frontiers that defined us, but also the fragility of those ideals, and yet also still the possibility of their renewal, even miraculously (as it happens, there is a serious genetic effort underway to resuscitate the PP from extinction). The pigeon is carrying an olive branch, of course, with red, white, and blue olives. The olive branch is huge, much too big for a bird to fly with, symbolizing the challenge ahead of us to reach across the chasms and divides, but he is carrying it forward anyway (his bright colours identify this pigeon as a male), as he must, as *we* must. And where is he? Flying across the fields of Gettysburg on a beautiful, promising-looking morning, with nary a cannon in sight. The quote on the inside, from the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, reinforces the message of unity and togetherness. All monies collected (15% of sales before taxes) will go to help fund Creative Politics, a new initiative under development that will be the world’s first community-based political incubator, synthesizing the best of liberal and conservative ideals, history and technology, to generate projects, campaigns, showcases, contests, and more--all well outside the Beltway--that we hope will help restore our nation, as well as the joy of politics and political endeavour.