Shawn Thew / AP, file
President Joe Biden delivers his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol, March 1, 2022, in Washington. When lawmakers gather for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, the Republican side of the aisle will look slightly different than in years past. The House Republican majority has Black, Latino and female elected officials in their ranks.
Sunday, March 5, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Venus and Jupiter kissing? How can that be?
Well, it can’t be. That’s the point. But this past week it has looked that way to those of us on planet Earth who dared to look up.
So, since this column is about perspective, let’s gain a little when it comes to kissing planets and what I thought about as I looked up.
Jupiter — let’s call him the aggressor because of his enormous size and gaseous existence — is somewhere between 350 million and 600 million miles away from our front porch here on Earth. The disparity has something to do with the elliptical paths the planets take traveling around the sun.
Venus — how can she ever be an aggressor? — is somewhere between 25 million and 160 million miles from Earth.
But on certain nights like we enjoyed last week, those two planets appear not only to be the brightest stars (yes, I know they are planets) but also to be almost touching each other. Hence the term “kissing.”
Of course, if you want to talk about stars and galaxies and solar systems, we are no longer talking about hundreds of millions of miles. We are talking about the closest galaxy to our own being somewhere around 236,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. I don’t even know how to describe that number!
I mention all of this as a way of putting all the Sturm und Drang that defines our existence on Earth today — or at least in the United States — into some perspective.
For example, in homes down the street or across our town, there are human beings struggling to figure out how to pay their credit card bills, which represent the purchases they have already made in their lives. They aren’t considering whether to pay — they know they owe the money — just how to pay it.
And, yet, just a few thousand miles from here — in Washington, D.C. — there actually are other human beings who are planning not to pay our country’s credit card debts, which will have the effect of making our own household-level commitments impossible to keep.
For example, while our scientists are trying to explore our own solar system looking for signs of life — usually defined by the presence of water — we are struggling in the Southwest with climate-changing droughts — read that as an absence of water — that makes water even more precious. In the East, the presence of way too much water threatens lives and property on an annual and unrelenting basis.
And, in the middle of all this imbalance, which begs for a simple and obvious answer, human beings are acting like, well, human beings. Pettiness rules the days and weeks of fruitless negotiations about how to parcel out what little water we have.
And, all the while, 3,000 miles away the Washington politicians argue about the existence of climate change and man’s obvious role in exacerbating the worst parts of it.
Do you think for a moment that anyone or anything — I have always assumed there is someone, somewhere out there — who is looking down on Earth from either kissing planets or far-off galaxies, seeing our changing and life-altering weather patterns, thinks for even a second about debt ceilings and abortion pills and transgender bathrooms and mini tyrants who want to ban books?
I don’t.
If there is someone with that kind of perspective watching what we do to ourselves, how we tear at each other and at the fabric that has held the United States together as a democratic beacon to our world for almost 250 years, they must conclude that we are not great, we are not exceptional and we are not worthy of leading this tiny little speck of the entirety of existence.
Instead, they most certainly would conclude that humanity — at least that which inhabits the United States of America — resembles more the pettiness of man than the potential of mankind.
That’s what I thought when I saw the “kissing planets.” And I also thought that we could become what our forefathers envisioned if only we looked up with hope instead of at our neighbors with jealousy and envy. And, yes, with the small-minded pettiness that seems to have overtaken common sense and common purpose — for now.
P.S. On a personal note, I used this space many years ago to welcome my beautiful baby girl into the world, so I cannot let this moment pass without wishing that beautiful little girl a very happy and healthy birthday. Like the galaxies so far beyond our grasp, your mother and I cannot understand how you and we can be the same age. We love you.
