“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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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.”

Dr. Carl Sagan “The Pale Blue Dot”

Perspective is a sobering thing. It diminishes self worth and burns away the misguided notion we hold of the importance of our culture and ourselves. To appreciate our value as a species should not look around us at our relative position in the stew of life on earth, but outward to the vast unknown cosmic mystery that God authored so many eons ago.

It is here that the mind-numbing expanse of space and darkness whispers to us, that we are but lonely sojourners, temporary residents of a speck in a universe of unknowable age. All we have ever been, ever aspired to accomplish as a society of men, the totality of our collective successes and failures, our loves and our passionate hatred of each other, is but a constituent part of a mot of dust suspended in a vacuous beam of light.

Our failings, our distrust of each other is understandable. We have learned from our experience that inside us is hardwired a recklessness and an abandonment of frightening proportion. One needs only to look at the careless way we misuse our natural resources, at the cruelty we inflict on our bothers and sisters and our children for the most banal of reasons, to see that sometimes the best that we can accomplish is to momentarily avoid our own demise. Drugs, poverty, the spread of deadly but avoidable disease, and war are thinning our chances of avoiding a calamitous end. But even an incidental survival is but a battle won in a war that will inevitably be lost should we fail to heed the caution that calls us back from the brink.

How we, as individuals, can address this is daunting. Where do we start to tamp down the fires of our innate destructive tendencies on a scale necessary to impede a self-inflicted demise? How can we control our species when we can scarcely control ourselves? We can presume that educating our people on a global scale will provide an incentive for self-preservation. We can hope that by taking steps to reverse the centuries long rape of the planet’s eco-system we can engender a sense of long-term ownership, which will tend to provide us collectively with a reason to preserve what we have. At the very least we can advocate for humane treatment of our third world neighbors and for minimal health and safety standards for everyone. These are things that can be done on a micro scale and which can, perhaps, have a meaningful and positive influence.

We can require of those governments that we have created, a stewardship that reflects our values as human beings and our collective aspirations to uplift and edify. Then we must hold them accountable when they fail to act decisively to this end. We can and must find a way to co-exist with our enemies, feral as their hatred for us may be, without destroying the very fabric of the societies we are struggling to preserve.

This place, this planet described to eloquently by Sagan is where we make our last stand.

To accept the reality of our self-destructive tendency is not to give up or give in to those primal inevitabilities; it is not a capitulation to hopelessness. This is our home. It defines us. We are stewards of this place and it is our responsibility to our progeny and our creator, not to destroy it along with ourselves in some global moment of incendiary anger.

Sagan again, “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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot..”

We all need to take a cosmic time out, while we still can.