We bring you a break from your regularly scheduled serving of sarcasm, vitriol and bitter, hate-filled rhetoric.
Have you ever taken a moment on a clear night to stare up into the sky? It's especially beautiful in the country, away from city lights. You look up, and the brilliant stars and planets, cold remote pinpricks in the velvet black sky, look back down, twinkling occasionally. There's Venus - there's Mars - there's Jupiter. The Big Dipper hangs in the north. Splashed casually across the sky is the Milky Way, shining like a spray of diamond dust. You look up, staring directly into the galaxy's heart. Stars gaze impassively back.
The universe is a huge mansion, and we live on a dust mote in the closet. The night sky is our window into the impersonal vastness of the cosmos, which regards us unblinkingly. The farthest we've gone is the Moon -ยก- so close to us that on the scale of our solar system, we are one entity - and it took three days. Mars is three whole years away, and it's our second-closest neighbor.
Even our Earth is huge beyond imagining: behold the majestic Rocky Mountains, or the expansive rolling Sahara Desert - and it is less than nothing on the scale of galaxies.
And here we are, on a tiny little patch of Earth as our planet swings around the sun, while the sun hurtles through space on its 65-million-year journey around our galaxy. And the Milky Way beats with an even slower pulse, racing toward an inevitable collision with the Andromeda Galaxy in two billion years. Some people find this exhilarating; some find it absolutely terrifying.
But in the end, we are who we are, where we are, nothing we say or do can change that we're nothing when compared to the sun or unblinking stars. When we compare to each other, however, we're all something. We're all individuals with thoughts and feelings, and our lives form the tapestry of society. All of us are privileged with hopes, fears, stresses and ideas, and not a single one of us is the only three-dimensional person on the planet.
It can be difficult to remember that fundamentally (with perhaps the exception of a few broken Bundy-esques) we're all in the same boat. When you're stuck in traffic and someone cuts you off, perhaps he deserves the scatological language and expressive sign language you direct his way - but he might also be late for work, just argued with his wife and has indigestion, to boot.
We could delve into all sorts of nitty-gritty details behind why this emotional symmetry is a basis for the golden rule, why society is generally better off when people obey the golden rule and why we should all obey it. But at the end of the day an emotional appeal (fallacious though it technically is) should get the gist across: every little detail, every sunbeam-smile, every held door and helped homework makes someone's life a little bit better and makes the world a little better place.
Remember that the next time you look up into the sky, a gnat gazing upon a mountain: insignificance next to the universe's grandeur. We're stuck with each other's hopes, dreams, fears and lives. Why not make them better?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled sardonic, vituperous, acerbic rantings.
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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