Day 287: Racism and our pale blue dot

If I were to show you a map of the known universe the size of a large building, the spot marking earth and where this photo was taking would be overlapping. Feel small yet?

We don’t learn from our mistakes, the 1918 flu for example. We learned nothing from it and were doomed to repeat history when COVID-19 came around. Look at the news right now, any of this look vaguely familiar? It should, even in my lifetime we’ve seen this happen several times over, but nothing has changed. We refuse to learn.

As someone who has seen the horror of war, I’m deathly afraid that we are headed for our own war. A war against equality, one where the government can and will murder and silence people who speak out or fight against it. We’re already seeing a call for the military to quell the protests and Trump is urging city leaders to be ruthless about it. We have been occupied by an invading force and we didn’t even notice.

The protests show no signs of stopping and that makes me happy. We cannot go back and should not go back to the way things were no matter how much the government wants us to do so. The system isn’t broken, it can’t be reformed, it was built racist and it needs to be torn down. What replaces it should be something that we the people build. It should enshrine the simplest belief that was stated, but never upheld. The belief that all people are created equal.

That by virtue of birth we are no better than any other person. Our birth circumstances may give us things better or worse than the people around us, but that does not make you better than another person. We scream that black lives matter not because they matter more than any other life, but because they have mattered so much less than their white counterpart.

When we look at images of space we don’t see borders, because those are man-made. They are a construct and like any construct they are not real. The truth is so much simpler than we try to make it. We are all human. We are all stuck on a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In the face of the truth that we as a planet have existed for less than the blink of an eye in the cosmic time scale and our existence in this universe will most certainly go unnoticed as we fade into whatever darkness awaits us, we choose to argue over skin color?

In the innumerable wonders of the universe that have been laid out for us to solve we choose not to look up, but to look down at others because we are afraid of the truth. The truth is we don’t matter. We’re left judging each other for differences so we can feel superior for the brief existence we were given.

Whatever you believe, be it cosmic fate or a higher creator, we were given the gift of self-awareness. You are squandering that gift if you are using it to justify why a skin color makes you better than the rest of us. There are more mysteries of the universe to solve than we will be able to in all human existence past, present, and future. If that scares you into pretending and justifying that you are better than the people around you, you are surely missing the point.

I can’t tell you what the meaning of life is; maybe it’s simply to live. What I can tell you is this, if the sum of your existence, your legacy, is to judge people by their differences because you are scared, then you will be forgotten. Your life will have been wasted. You have a choice and if you choose to be racist or bigoted then you not only failed the test that is existence, you didn’t even show up for it.