We Are Not Alone

"When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity: he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence."

                         Upton Sinclair

When I hear Republicans (and they are mostly only Republicans) insisting global warming is a hoax, or insisting creationism be taught alongside evolution in public schools I sometimes think this is all a new pernicious descent into a sort of societal dementia. We are just getting dumber and dumber and when we get enough really dumb people around, they will all vote in a new truth for us to accept as official doctrine and the sun will revolve around the earth, which is flat as a saucer.

But then I read someone like Upton Sinclair who was writing at the dawn of the 20th century and I realize there has always been a moronic Right. The wonder is we have an enlightened Left. 

With respect to global warming, and the contempt and vitriol  which flow from the mouths of Republicans from Texas and oil producing states, Oklahoma, Louisiana, directed at that public enemy number one: The Environmental Protection Agency, well there is that other Sinclair observation:  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

And I think, we have been through all this before. As Lincoln remarked during the most horrific days of the Civil War, when the casualty lists were distributed to sobbing mobs, "This too, shall pass."

It is comforting to read of really nasty times--just read Howard Zinn--and you realize as bad as things are now, we've seen worse. 

If,  as Mephistopheles tells Dr. Faustus, the worst hell is remembering happier times, then in a sense, there is a little solace, if not a little  heaven, in realizing we've sailed through stormier seas before.


So, we are not alone--we have that great majority to comfort us, to offer us security, to speak to us from the past, the majority of all  human beings who have ever  lived,  their lives now over. They have  died and preceded us to the great beyond, and they comfort us from there even now.