Earthlings on The Pale Blue Vegan Dot
I can’t sleep.
I’ve been trying to get up early and instead it’s backfiring. I go to bed with excellent intentions…then I lie in bed awake. Then I start getting ideas and feel so invigorated I want to just leap up from my bed with a clatter like in T’was The Night Before Christmas.
So I just decided to write a little blog post.
Well today my mom gave me a present. She had gotten me a photo by Jo-Anne McArthur for Christmas. She wanted to frame it for me, so she did. And she finally gave it to me today. Thanks MOM!! U DA BOM. ? No.
Mother, I thank thee kindly.
When she handed it to me and I looked at it, I was so struck by it.
I wrote on the facebook page:
When i saw it i was so struck by how perfect it is. it is even deeper to me now than when I first saw it.
It sums up all of the deep ideas at the heart of veganism.
Veganism–there is so much controversy and hype about it– but at the heart it is about this.
We are all earthlings. I haven’t even seen earthlings but that’s brilliant.
A chimp hand and an old woman’s hand– touching, sharing this wordless connection we all feel to each other and to all life forms on earth.
Isn’t there something mystical and amazing that we all share the ability to understand eachother despite language differences or abilities.
Veganism is about this mystical truth that we are all in this together– animals too– despite war and slavery– we are the same. All of us are created equal.
(I wonder if this is what earthlings is about and I’m late to the party.)
Have you ever heard that quote by Carl Sagan about the pale blue dot? You can hear him say it in his great voice here.
“We succeeded in taking a picture of earth from deep space, and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
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. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan,
I feel Carl got the same feeling looking at that picture of the pale blue dot, that I get from looking at this picture of Jo-Anne’s.
Two species, who aren’t supposed to understand each other, but do, touch hands and share in that moment ….. the mysteries of life on this pale blue dot.
Meanwhile, the other people on the pale blue dot insist animals aren’t even conscious.
Veganism is deeper than it seems.
It is about recognizing the need for freedom and justice for all living things.
We are all earthlings on the pale blue dot, all sharing in this miracle of life.
That’s the heart of veganism, I think.
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