Beyond the Pale Blue Dot

Click for big if you can't read the text. Wise words, and it puts things in perspective. A True perspective, but then you'll find that the objective, absolute Truth often does not matter, but instead what does is our subjective truths. Or even our lies.

Send your mind out into space - past Neptune, past Pluto, past Sirius, past Orion, past Andromeda, keep going out billions of light years, and there are more stars, more galaxies, more planets, but keep going, it never ends - space stretching out to infinity in all directions, and here we are, simultaneously at the center of everything and just another speck in the cosmic infinities. This is all Truth, and in this Truth the value of a single life is insignificant. In fact, the value of our planet, our solar system, our star, is utterly insignificant in comparison to the scale of our Universe, and perhaps even the Multiverse. But then there's this:

Caroline Previdi, age 6 when she died yesterday at the hands of a truly sick individual with guns. And you think of the terror and the horror she must have experienced in her last moments, and all the ensuing horror for her parents, her family, her friends, and all the other people affected by the events in Newtown, CT yesterday. And it's all very significant, isn't it?

Will this horror change anything here on planet Earth, in the country of America? I sure hope so. Today it seems like it might. But I've grown cynical enough over the past... 20 years... that I'm pessimistic.

I spend a lot of time (too much) in the "trenches", so to speak, of Right Wing thought. Let me summarize them for you: No matter how bad you think they are, they're worse then you know, maybe even worse then you can imagine. After being shocked then thinking I cannot be shocked any more, I was once again shocked yesterday reading their reactions to this tragedy. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that in our subjective little insignificant reality, there's real people, real issues, and real evil out there who don't give a fuck. And you can't use mental illness as an excuse for these people. For the leadership of the NRA, for example. For the Republican party, for example. These people are actually evil - in our subjective state - and unfortunately we often live, and die, at their whims. In their quest for nothing more than money.

A sad day, a sad world. And yet one we can make better. If we try. Will we?