By Larry Berz
Another Monday morning from the halls of the Science Center looks grim indeed. A cold rain beats against the large pain windows while the scattered debris of Summer’s greenery woefully cyclones along the lawn and distant woods.
Shakespeare’s Autumn description smacks us to smarten up while facing the “wrackful seige of battered days.” It is probably a good a time as any to take stock of our celestial perceptions. “Where are we?” serves as the clarion question for each good citizen of the County. Can our recognition of this “pale blue dot”, as Carl Sagan reminds us, guide or transform our routines to the exquisitely sensitive awareness of life on the only living planet in the solar system?
It’s serious business, folks. I tend to avoid more than a cursory glance at the headlines these days. But humanity, locally to globally, appears terribly troubled and confounded — physically, mentally, socially, politically, economically, artistically. Our collective ability to report information and transmit the “news” world wide accelerates us into a meaningless orbit. How can any one adult mind process the world today?
Trucks race to and fro down Route 1A. Who drives the rigs? What is the cargo? Where is the destination? I think this applies to our planetary civilization as well too. We seem in such a furious hurry to arrive where?
The old folk icon, Neil Young, sang in 1969 that “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” but the lesson of that voice falls on largely deaf ears. Who dares question the routine of established byways and highways anyways? Who is this clown writing this column? Throw the bum out!
In the amusement of my mind, I imagine a Revolution — a Revolution where every County character protests, whether from the Right or from the Left. People simply, like the character from the old “Network” film, declare “I’m sick and tired and I’m not going to take it anymore!” And everyone starts to march, to march to the beat of Thoreau’s “drummer”. Drum, drum, drum. March, march, march. We all shout our slogans and beat our breasts. And when the marching’s over, we all sit down to a nice boiled dinner.
For untold years, since childhood, I thought the answer to important Life Questions rested up there, among the stars. My young life was saturated and seduced by the NASA and America’s tribute to President Kennedy’s vision of “landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade. A lunar landing was infinitely more accessible to process and embrace than war in Vietnam, 55,000 nuclear weapons, environmental catastrophe, or social injustice and global doctrines. History was not to me a nightmare from which to awake, but simply a series of epic movies in time to recognize, celebrate, or ignore if unpleasant.
After the run of Apollo success stories, ending in 1972, I found myself without rudder to navigate with these earlier feelings. In high school, my moon landing dreams evaporated in the light of new realities: military service (?), SAT, college, a career. Where did my dreams and related ambitions fly?
Over the course of the last 20 years, in spite of our technological progress in information and communication, I am now convinced that barring some new “Great Awakening” of our moral duties to the true nature of science and society, that even the solar system is off limits to Earth’s people.
I see too much evidence of our own inability to wisely steward our own planet to give condonation to any program to establish the human presence on any other world. And I tend to feel that in spite of our rocket boys and girls, that human destructiveness apathy, and negligence is overridingly predominant in our management of things celestial. Space was never intended, I believe, for faster phones, big business development, or military superiority.
The Universe will simply mock our inflated technological pride unless we smarten up ourselves, and reflect and consider with a new unforeseen humility in our humanity. An information, high technology seduced society will never survive its own conceit.
Larry Berz of Limestone is planetarium director and astronomy educator at the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton.
