Coming Together

RONALD REAGAN, in a rare moment of lucidity, reflected that were the Earth invaded by extraterrestrials, humanity would cease warring among itself, and unite in defense. Given a comparable opportunity, the old ancient acting warmonger declined; he said no when Gorbachev offered to rid the world of nuclear weapons. But Reagan had a point. What humanity needs is a common purpose, a transcendent reason to transcend international borders and conflicts. As a child I thought that space flight would fill the bill. But, alas, we seem to have, at least for several decades, given up on the ideal of exploring space with human beings, and we relegated ourselves to space shuttle redundancy and space probes. Neither has pervasive poverty or disease done the trick. Climate change, for purposes of human unification, still holds promise, but the damned right wing american climate change deniers keep getting in the way. Enter the virus, and for a brief, flickering moment there was a glimmer of hope. Not for the virus, which we'll lick, but for true pan-people cooperative unification. But even as the curve begins to show signs of flattening, even as we can begin to see life beyond Covid 19, life returned to some semblance of normal, we sense that the old animosities, personal, political, international, the old divisiveness which has plagued human kind since homo sapien sapiens evolved on this planet, shall return. We simply cannot seem to get our of our own way. It seems that fundamental human nature is immutable, not prone to mutate and drastically change course like viruses do. maybe, like Einstein and the bible said, as long as there are people, there will be wars. And so it may be that the Gipper, not known for his intellectual stature, had it right after all, that the only possible force great enough to compel humanity into unified behavior is a serious threat from an alien life form from beyond the stars. the fact that such an intelligent species of beings, able to come to Earth and to threaten us, would doubtless easily have the ability to note only defeat us, but to completely exterminate us, in which case, we would be back to exactly where we started from; the beginning.