A Message of Light

“Do you remember when we used to be fearless
Way back when we knew less…”
— Sara Niemietz

We live in an incredibly dark time. A pandemic is killing us. Our institutions are failing us. Our people are protesting in the greatest numbers in American history. Half of us suspect the other half of plotting our destruction. Our economy is collapsing. People are desperate to find the money to avoid homelessness.

We are required by threat of monstrous poverty to work at whatever tasks we can find. We must find the means to pay for our very existence, as though we had no right to the oxygen we breathe. Some of us are successful. Most of us are not. Few of us have the chance to pursue our passions. Nearly all of us are stifled geniuses.

Darker still, our country is not only divided by ideology, as it has been for far too long, but now this ever weakening nation is battling an invisible enemy that is killing us all with extraordinary speed, without regard to our manufactured and perceived differences. Republicans and Democrats are dying. Independents and Libertarians are falling to it. The Straight and the Queer are shuffling off this mortal coil. The Christians, the Muslims, the Atheists, and the Jews, the Buddhists, and the Hindus, and all the undecided human beings are being slaughtered at the altar of a virus. No border stops it. It kills and debilitates indiscriminately. Covid is an equal opportunity murderer. It treat us all as equals… because… we are.

Now, it is as dark as it can be. It is the darkness of the blind. It is complete. It is oppressive. Is there in darkness no beauty? Let’s see. Look up.

Look into the depths of the night sky. It is in the greatest darkness that stars shine most brightly. You, too, as Sagan told us, are made of “star stuff.” You’re one of those incredibly distant tiny points of light fighting its way through the eternity of space time. And it’s only in the dark that your divine fire can be seen.

I know you don’t believe me. You and I are tiny. What can we do? We can vote every couple of years, and even then we’re more than tiny. Our votes are all but microscopic. They make no discernible difference. You’re right. You know what else is microscopic? A coronavirus is 125 one millionths of a meter. Let’s see that more clearly. You can imagine a meter stick. Now, divide it in your mind into a million tiny equal pieces. Smash 125 of those pieces together. They’re too tiny to see with the human eye, but they’re more than big enough to see with the mind’s eye. That virus is smaller than your influence on what happens in the world. Its effects, however, are not.

How is it so powerful? It changes a little tiny bit at a time. And it spreads invisibly. It has no sense of morality. It is, in fact, not even sentient.

You are more powerful than a virus. You have a moral compass. You know that a world that includes preventable homelessness is simply morally wrong. You don’t need me to convince you. A world that murders Mozart, butchers Beethoven, and destroys Da Vinci is a world doomed to hopelessness and despair. And you can change that world. How?

You change just one mind about one small thing. You don’t make a white supremacist into an Idealist over a bowl and a beer. You just get him to recognize that somewhere, in all the billions and billions of people on this planet, there might be one other human, perhaps a newborn infant, who is as different from the two of you as she can be, but she, too, deserves a decent life simply because she was born.

You’re only one tiny little drop of water in the Colorado River. And you’ve moved only a single grain of sand. But you’re not carving The Grand Canyon alone. We’re all here with you. We’ll each try to move another grain of sand. But how do we do it? How can we change even a single mind about even a single idea?

Think about the last time you changed your mind about anything. Did your mind change because someone called you a Libtard or a fascist or a snowflake or a Cheeto Worshiper? Did you ever change your mind because someone told you to wake up? Did anyone ever change your mind by telling you that you are either crazy or an idiot to believe what you do? Those methods are almost invariably as unsuccessful as they are popular. So, what do we do?

While the virus attacks people maliciously, we don’t attack people at all. We attack ideas. We attack arguments. Covid spreads because people are sharing a common space. Our ideas spread without the need of a physical space. We spread in the mind.

You and I are occupying Common Ground now. In a little while, you’ll be occupying Common Ground with someone else. If my ideas of hope can inspire you, and your ideas of hope can inspire someone else… I’m sure you understand exponential growth. Think of what we can do… together.

This catastrophe may well destroy much of our world. When it does, we will rebuild. It’s what humans do.

When we rise like a Phoenix from the ashes of our despair, what Brave New World will we create? Can we ensure all of us have our physical and safety needs met so we can begin to ascend Maslow’s Pyramid instead of breaking our bodies and spirits to construct our modern Pharaoh’s pointless pyramids? Imagine all the children fed. See the infants smiling while they have baby food slipping down the edges of their tiny lips? Imagine all the homeless in their own dwellings, directing their own lives. Imagine what the Murdered Mozarts will create when we take them from the tossing train and deposit them in their own homes, loved by their own families.

Start with kindness. Continue with empathy. Follow the course of the brightest star in your sky. Let it teach you… And then… just Shine.