Tucked Away
Who are we?
We find that we live
on an insignificant planet
of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy
tucked away
in some forgotten corner of a universe
in which
there are far more galaxies
than people.
-Carl Sagan
I’ve got my hands on a copy of Palestinian poet Hisham Bustani’s book of story-poems, entitled The Monotonous Chaos of Existence. I feel eagerness to read this skilled word-smith, and some dread that my imagination will be asked to comprehend the texture of abject, impersonal, brutal war.
Gaza has been leveled, buildings are just piles of concrete and broken furniture, and personal effects. Without question unclaimed remains, members of someone’s family lay buried in those block after blocks of debris.
Just yesterday our just elected President insisted that America would “take over” Gaza, exiling the surviving inhabitants to Jordan or Egypt to live in beautiful and safe housing. He envisions a resort on the land. Some formidable obstacles to this idea 1) Gaza, a sovereign territory is not ours to take. 2) Jordan and Egypt rejected the idea. They want nothing to do with it. 3) President Trump has a well earned reputation as a con. He is recognized as a whimsical liar. Wearing a suit and standing in front of the seal of the United States do not help. 4) Palestinian survivors of IDF ‘shock and awe’ desire to return to their homeland.
Words by Carl Sagan serve as the entry point to the Bustani volume. Sagan urges that all of us be done with our ridiculous bravado, that somehow we are the center of the cosmos.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
One thought on “Tucked Away”
The human brain is a never-ending source of unfathomable mystery. To think that the same species that brought forth Aristotle, Socrates, DaVinci, Copernicus, Newton, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Einstein, Sagan, et al, saddled us with the moronic buffoons who brought us the Inquisition, The Third Reich, Trumpism, and on and on and on ad nauseam. How is it possible?