Something to think about

As we begin the New Year, the arbitrary start of another trip around the sun for planet earth, I am reminded of a newspaper article I read back in September when we were in Wisconsin visiting family.

In the article, NASA announced that in August 2012, the Voyager 1 space probe had flown beyond the heliopause (the limit of the sun's solar wind) and entered interstellar space.

Voyager 1 was launched about 35 years ago, on September 5, 1977, and has been traveling at almost 38,000 miles per hour for that entire time. It is more than 12 billion miles from the sun now.

To put this in perspective, the article stated that in order to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, located 4.24 light years from the sun, Voyager 1 would need to continue at its present speed for another 40,000 years. Yes, 40,000 years! I looked up at my father across the breakfast table to confirm that he had read the article. "Forty thousand years!" I said. He chuckled and said, "Humankind will be long gone by then!"

I think he's probably right. We are making our planet unlivable at a furious rate, and there's nowhere else to go. Mars? It's already what the earth will eventually become. We are stuck here with the mess we've created.

There's a golden record aboard Voyager 1 containing a wealth of audio and visual information about life on earth. If the record is ever discovered by intelligent life, it will serve not as an invitation to come visit but as a relic of what once was.

Peabody

In keeping with the season, here are the first two paragraphs of a fictional story I started writing a few years ago:

     Peabody awoke to the sharp slap of the bartender's hand on the bar top. "Time to go!" the bartender shouted as Peabody lifted his muzzy head to regain his senses. It was closing time, and he had no idea how long he had been passed out. He slid off his stool but reached for the rail as his wobbly legs failed to support him. Images whirling in his vision coalesced into an exit sign above the bar’s door. He stumbled toward it and reached for the door to regain his balance, but the door swung open and he fell face-first into the slush covering the sidewalk outside. Peabody rolled onto his back and stared up into the flurry of snowflakes falling from the yellow sky. Winter, he thought, and exhaled a cloud of beer-soaked steam into the chill night air. More accurately, New Year's Eve, he remembered. Where are all the merrymakers, he wondered, turning his head from side to side to confirm that he was very much alone. He waved his wrist in front of his face to check his watch. It was two o'clock. Rolling back over and struggling to his feet, he brushed the snow off his clothes and staggered off into the night.
     Peabody hadn't always been like this, a drunk alone for the holidays. In better times, he had been something of a success. He had always been bright, which is how he had earned the nickname "Peabody," after the smarter half of Peabody and Sherman, the cartoon duo from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. The original Peabody was the talking dog who wore glasses and was always a step ahead of his boy sidekick Sherman in solving that episode’s mystery. The intelligence came with a price though, and Peabody didn't realize it until he had already graduated from college in the early 1980s.

Smallmindedness

Somewhere along the way, we have lost our sense of community. This may be a natural product of our modern impersonal world, but I believe there's more to it than that.

This morning Nan and Charlie and I took what is becoming our traditional New Year's desert hike in the Tabeguache area near our home. As we were nearing the end of our loop, we passed three people and a dog in a narrow section going the other way. The woman in front was concerned about their dog interacting with our dog Charlie, so she leaned over to grab his collar and passed without acknowledgement. I gave the young teenage girl who was next a big "Happy New Year," but she didn't reply and didn't make eye contact, so I repeated myself to the man behind her, who mumbled "Happy New Year" in reply as he glanced our way in passing.

When I'm out walking Charlie, I make a habit of saying hello to everybody we pass who bothers to make eye contact. I figure we're all out enjoying the same activity, so we might as well be friendly--maybe not as friendly as our butt-sniffing dogs, but at least cordial. My observation is that many people, especially younger people, do not share this feeling at all. They don't return the greeting or they don't make eye contact in the first place. It seems they lack the self-confidence to address strangers, or they are emotionally indifferent to people they don't know. Either way, it results in treating strangers as objects or obstacles.

You see this everywhere these days. Walking in the mall, you need to swerve to avoid people who would otherwise walk right into you. Driving on the highway, you need to go faster than the speed limit just to avoid being rear-ended. Waiting in a line, you need to look out for people cutting in front of you. "Please" and "thank you" have been replaced by "gimme." "Excuse me" no longer exists. The thought of holding a door or letting someone else go first doesn't even enter the mind.

And that's where it starts. With the mind. If your mind is so small that you can't think beyond yourself and your own selfish needs, if you've totally lost touch with the reality that we are all in this life together, if you don't realize that the best any of us can hope for is a little common decency from one another, then you are on your own. You don't belong to the community because you don't even know it exists. Open your eyes. See those strangers. Open your mind. Think about your place in this world.

Happy New Year, everybody.