N4mddissent
Active Member
- Sep 30, 2008
- 878
- 140
- 28
This post may be criticized for lack of true relevance, but I just was thinking about this race and the last few years and how ugly and bitter political races and those who follow them have become. It's easy to get swept up into the fervor of a candidate or platform and then, in the heat of the competition, somehow let that override a sense of decency. Suddenly you no longer have opponents and begin to think of people as enemies.
The guy in Florida who threatened to kill Obama. That concerns me. And the way Palin had people whipped up at some of those Obama pals with terrorists rallies got me thinking that some of those people might not be able to shut it off afterwards. We really have to come together as the public and start really complaining and perhaps eventually boycotting candidates if they don't focus on more positive messages about themselves. That goes for red, blue, green, and the rest of the spectrum as well.
And remember, in the end, we're all Americans, we're all humans. Here's great passage from Carl Sagan that helps put things in perspective, along with the photograph he is referring to.
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
The guy in Florida who threatened to kill Obama. That concerns me. And the way Palin had people whipped up at some of those Obama pals with terrorists rallies got me thinking that some of those people might not be able to shut it off afterwards. We really have to come together as the public and start really complaining and perhaps eventually boycotting candidates if they don't focus on more positive messages about themselves. That goes for red, blue, green, and the rest of the spectrum as well.
And remember, in the end, we're all Americans, we're all humans. Here's great passage from Carl Sagan that helps put things in perspective, along with the photograph he is referring to.
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
