Tomorrow I hope to report on a wonderful day of fun and celebration at the UC Pride festival in Cookeville TN. I hope I can walk my children into the park and not have to explain to them why there are hateful people with signs, yelling and calling people names, threatening eternal torture with Hell fire. If I have to explain it I will. I don’t hide the world from them. They will learn that the intellectual ancestors of those same people held their bibles high as they hurled their hatred at slaves who dared to defy that bible and be free, that they were the same people whose religion justified segregation and who fought hard against women’s suffrage, who called interracial marriage an abomination to their god. My children need to know the world they have inherited. More than that, though, tomorrow I want them to see some of the good we have brought into the world. We have fought hard to be able to stand in the open and celebrate freedom and acceptance in a world where once people could only hide. They should be proud of that and so should you.
I’ve been sitting at home watching Cosmos and so I would like to lead into this weekend with some words from Carl Sagan:
In our tenure of this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.
Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet earth. But, up and in the cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
And with that I bid you good night.
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