Recent events shocked the World. However, I don’t really want to talk about high casualties in Nice or Turkey in recent two days, event thought this post was motivated by these events. We live in a world that is shaking unstable. There are terrorist attacks almost on monthly bases, many Middle East and African countries are in civil wars, we see a lot of racism and religious non tolerance, etc. However, if you look at the bigger picture and what is causing these conflicts, they are irrelevant and even stupid. I would be brave enough to say that most of the conflicts people have (between people or between nations, groups, etc.) are usually motivated by stubbornness of a crazy little irrelevant thing. The sad thing is that these things that are even now irrelevant or will be in next years or so take hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of human lives – lives that can create and enrich the current state of the art or science, influence people to be better. Usually casualties are the least guilty ones. And I would like to share 2 texts that explain how irresponsible we are starting these wars or conflicts and how we cannot see the bigger picture, until we step back, into the space and look back to Earth from long distance, where there is rich scenary, but Earth is only a pale blue dot. I could not say it better than Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator. First text is Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot”. Here it is, please watch video, but most important part is underlined in text:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I
“We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
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 in 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 the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. 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.
To my mind, 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 and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. “
Other text is Serbian rap song by Marchelo, that I translated into English today. It is a first draft, but I believe it as well well underlines how wrong we are looked from the distance. The song is called “The letter to the alien” and it does have some harsh ending, which I don’t agree. I believe we should work to make Earth better and after some number of generation, the Earth will be good enough place for aliens to visit, but also good place for children to grow. With it we should be brave enough to bring children to it. The original of the song is here:
English lyrics:
Letter to the alien (Marchelo, album Children and sun)
You will tell that we called you,
That it is not fair to tell you now go back
That this is not the world that hastens to hug tourists
And is full of virtuous, no
Should I lie you? That is sin
Sorry for the invitation, we did not send it consciously
Nor with wish to fly so far for us
To abandon for us your peace, darkness and eternity gift and light
Here is not your place
Because life next to us would be like our life
And it is not worth to photograph such a scenery
When you come, they’ll see your colour, they’ll tell you what it means
What are you because of it and then they’ll add some spice:
They will assign you a nation and tell you that it is sacred
That you are hero because of the heroism of your ancestor
That you are bad because of the others from your lines
That you are good because someone was before
This is your flag, this is your dress,
When you see different one, attack like a beast,
Because they as well did on yours
Because neither on them ___ something
But what do you have with all that?
People call it faith, hypocritical bluff
That’s not hand of higher power, but hand of people from the past…
But when you look at it from your infinity, that all does not have importance
Everything man sculptured with fingers of his desperation
And that is the World, that are the people,
Empty and crazy, little and stupid, foreign.
I can’t allow you to come, forgive me.
I can’t allow you to come, understand me.
They will assign you religion and you will be that faith.
And you’ll die for that faith without a reason.
They’ll explain to you that God wants it from you,
Those that look at him through prism of their miserable temper
Lickspittle to him like to a boss in a company
Pray to him, pule and moan, request from him something.
That is how they understand divine goodness,
Like a conceited being that wants skilled lickspittle
Symbol of love they understand like a malicious ego,
That needs ants to compliment him, in order to be happy.
If they understand light like that, how do they understand the darkness?
Devil in a queue of the unemployment office begging for food
Because he is redundant to the world where war is always raging
In order for people to prove whose God has bigger cock!
If there is a God, he is only one
And you don’t need sword and temple to be loyal to him
He simply wants from you to be good,
Not to bribe priest and to lickspittle.
But if you ever say that, you are a traitor
Because here you are that: religion, nation and color.
People are dying because of that, because of the random lottery
If they were dawned-out elsewhere, everything would be different!
They would love what they hate now with the same passion,
And again it would be worth to pay with the head
At the end remains the hardest part, to disable your arrival and ask for forgiveness
We are both broken, but we don’t have guts for trying, forgive us…
Good day, we came for the abortion
