Gravity

Lightning crashes a new mother cries
Her placenta falls to the floor
The angel opens her eyes
The confusion sets in
Before the doctor can even close the door

Lightning crashes an old mother dies
Her intentions fall to the floor
The angel closes her eyes
The confusion that was hers
Belongs now to the baby down the hall

~Lightning Crashes, Live.

This was the very first thing that I saw when I logged into Facebook after I got home from work and some errand-running this morning. Visible scientific proof of a Black Hole, taken using a telescope (actually, many networked telescopes) effectively the size of the Earth. This is the Galaxy M87, 53 *Million* light years from Earth. This image we see is a million stars being destroyed by gravity so powerful that it will rip atoms apart before it consumes them.

In other news, Einstein was right, but I digress.

Take a moment, and consider the vast distances, the terrible speeds, destruction so vast that it breaks down even the most basic building block of matter itself, and a darkness so deep and profound that even energy or light does not escape from it. When the light we now see left this galaxy, humanity itself did not yet exist, and would not for many millions of years more. Hell, the *Dinosaurs* were still a fairly recent memory, as geological time goes. Think about that.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Not even five minutes later, I saw this. Country artist Charlie Daniels (who is still, mind you, coasting on stuff that he did in the 1970's) still harping on all the Benghazi bullshit, as if Hillary Clinton is still in government, and Trey Gowdy still has a career.

Nobody's talking about Benghazi anymore, Charlie. It's just you.

I'm going to be honest here. I've long since reached the point of white-hot incandescent rage when it comes to these small-minded, loud-mouthed malfunctioning idiots whose main goal in life seems to be gimcrack posturing and some kind of "defeat" of their "enemies" real or (as they so often are) imagined. It's 2019, Obama is out of office, Hillary Clinton didn't get elected, and one hell of a lot of people on both sides of our political line need to grow the fuck up and start realizing we have a lot of shit we gotta get done, just for the survival of our country and our species, and ultimately for the environment of the planet it lives on...for literally life itself as we know it or can even comprehend it.

Nobody but them cares about these fucking people's petty political bullshit. For the most part, if it serves any purpose at all, it's to further gum up the works and prevent real shit from getting done.

Does any of this seem stupid to you yet? Conservatives used to be the serious people who did shit like try to figure a way to get us to the Moon, now they're the people who tend to think the Earth is flat. Conservatives used to be the people who cared about truth and disapproved of foul language, now here's some Youtube meat-head promoting a known liar with both middle fingers upraised, to his ostensibly right-wing audience.

Tell me something, conservatives, what good is all this backward-looking, middle-finger-upraised make-the-liberals-mad uneducated bullshit doing anybody but the relative few right-wing media people, Republican politicians and their billionaire benefactors who promote it?!

History is replete with reactionary movements, uneducated proletarians crashing their own societies, fanatics burning down great libraries, learned rulers trampled and their cities sacked by uneducated barbarians...and for what? The fall of Rome did nothing but plunge Christian Europe into the Dark Ages. It took the rise of Islam and a completely different ethic that was not threatened by knowledge or science to keep human progress going. For all their ferocity, which allowed them to overpower Islamic armies and sack Baghdad, the Mongols contributed little to the overall scheme of things...but even the Mongols could competently run an empire while they had it. Everybody lamented the fall of Rome and the Classical civilizations it perpetuated and represented. Genghis Khan is still at least well remembered in Mongolia. What of these fucking people?

Even the people of England, a decade or so after he had died, couldn't stand Oliver Cromwell. They hated him so much they dug up his corpse and beheaded it.

Reactionaries don't end up well-remembered. Reactionaries don't prepare for the future. Reactionaries don't build starships.

But, what of people who can't be bothered to learn their own history, to know anything about where they came from or how the country they lead, or even just live in, was founded and why?

I had to learn about George Washington when I was a kid. Trump went to Mount Vernon and wondered why George didn't name it after himself, and wanted to know how wealthy George was. Way to miss the point, idiot.

In 2011, thanks to my roommate at the time being a Native veteran and member of the local Tribe's warrior society I learned about a thing that a fair number of groups were doing at the Fort Necessity National Battlefield in Pennsylvania.

I thought "Oh hey, I remember what that is from fifth-grade history. George Washington built Fort Necessity...before losing it to the French and their Native allies"

I learned about this in Catholic school. But yeah, go ahead and tell me how history is "Liberal."

Growing up as a kid in a moderate conservative family, I was expected to know my history, I was expected to learn about science. I was expected to care about the truth. For fuck's sake I was expected to pick up after myself and take care of my own garbage.

 If we don't know where we've been, how do we expect to get where we're supposed to be later on? If we don't take care of the things we have, or the place we live, why would we expect that we would still have them? And what are we?

That's the thing that pisses me off the most about these fucking people--NOTHING MATTERS BUT RIGHT NOW!!! For all of their calling other people "animals" it seems to be the Republicans who want to live like animals...every day just existing...nothing changing, memory like a damn Goldfish. Every day is Year Zero, nothing that happened before November 8th of 2016 even exists, much less matters, it's all about the joy of the moment...even as a lot of the things these people themselves say tell you that on some level they know it's never going to last. A lady that I know said recently that her 80-something-year-old boss came up to her and said, in effect "THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING AND WILL TAKE OVER, THE BLACKS WANT REPARATIONS AND THE MEXICANS WILL TAKE ALL OF OUR JOBS!!" all this without any particular prompting, so far as I know. Now, aside from the obvious paranoia and racism...does that sound like somebody who is the least bit confident that their beliefs, their philosophy or way of doing things is going to be successful, or is working out?

Whatever else is going on, whatever spell the right-wingers had over America for all these years seems broken. More to the point, they seem to finally be realizing that fact...over a year after I first made this observation myself. The weight of this realization seems to be settling on them like the pull of a Black Hole's gravity. At least one of them seems to understand the gig is up, and the gravity of the situation seems to be causing random outbursts.

Ya know, America...and by extension humanity as a whole...is about to face a choice. Gimcrack small-minded bullshit or maybe we can just hack doing the kind of science and hard work that can reach across 53 million light years and watch a galaxy be ripped apart by gravity. If we want to know more, we're going to have to go there, or at least get closer.

Creationists, conspiracy theorists and reactionaries don't build starships. Anti-vax nuts don't design the kind of life-support systems or life-science endeavors or medical care that might help us understand what it takes to crew starships or survive in environments vastly different from our own, and for all their talk about "Space forces" these people don't really seem to get that outside of science fiction, nobody's ever done the work of figuring out what it would take to fight a battle in space. Hell, to the best of my knowledge even science-fiction hasn't yet bothered with the physics of sex in micro-gravity, just sayin.' Just lack of gravity as directional force on our bodies changes almost everything.

When I read about this M87 galaxy, this morning, my first thought was I'll see your God and raise you a Galaxy-destroying Singularity.

Ya know, funny thing about gravity.

It'll kill you whether you believe in it or know anything about it or not.