I vividly remember the first time I stared into a clear, night sky, somewhere far from city lights, and came face to face with my philosophically minute meaninglessness.  My three or four or five-year-old self drank in my insignificance with growing terror until a shooting star or a mooing cow or a fart upstaged my mindset…and I moved on.  Like most of you, I mentally revisit that place from time to time and continue to be no less perplexed or terrified, having gained no comfort or insight from the passage of time or the accumulation, (as trivial as that might be), of knowledge.  We remain mere specks in an infinite, (sure, I know that there must be an end somewhere, but trying to imagine it makes my head explode), cosmos and maintaining a sense of self worth, no less dealing with the inanity surrounding us at every turn, is, well…challenging.

 The smartest and the dumbest among us would agree, in principle at least, that we have no control over the vast universe in which we are the tiniest of dots,  (of course, religious teachings purporting our creation by some uber-craftsman with a super cool set of Legos© confuses the issue…but I’m not going there this week), but as the Earth’s population has expanded and socialized and banded into tribes and clans and communities and towns and countries with alliances and treaties and trade relations and ideologies based on religion and wealth and bullshit, we tend to ignore our BIG picture insignificance and create new ones.  Those of us lucky enough to have been born into or escaped to one of the freer societies have gained those freedoms at the will of a too-big-to-imagine corporate, political and military complex.  We are told that our governance is a reflection of the will of the people, yet it is a lack of will, resulting from all of that staring at the night sky, that has brought us to such a dire time for humanity; banks running amok…too-big-to-fail; a wasteful and unfocused military complex…too-big-to-understand; a food and water supply…to-big-to-regulate; fat-cat governments…too-big-to-accomplish-anything; global, corporately owned media…too-beholding-to-tell-the-truth.

 I love that joke about the insomniac, agnostic, dyslexic who stayed up all night contemplating the existence of dog, but as pointless as his musings might be, our musings of a world that will somehow get itself back on track because somebody is taking care of things…right?…is equally empty.  As long as we are distracted by our tribalism or being sold a belief in clean coal or smoker’s rights and we continue to react to our universal tininess by acting superior to others, (blacks or gays or fluffy forest animals), our progress as a species will continue to deteriorate, (that would be the species that exists as a mere blip on our global timeline).  It is not logical to accept that life will be better at some designated time in the future because the machine is too-big-to-move-any-faster.  We need to decide to be too-big-to-be-denied.  Elections matter.