Good evening, everyone:

As I read accounts over the weekend of the list of 50 universities the Trump Administration intends to audit for their “imbalanced” curricula . . . of the defunding of the critical Section 4 program that enables LISC and Enterprise to support community development organizations . . . of the invocation of a 1798 act intended to protect against invasion during times of war . . . of the proposed elimination of the Community Development Finance Institution fund on which so many of our loan partners rely . . .  and so much more . . . . . . . .

I went in search of something to take my mind out of the darkness. Because I haven’t for a while, I thought I would look up.

Some thirty years ago, as the request of the astronomer Carl Sagan, the Voyageur spacecraft turned its lens back toward earth one final time before leaving our solar system and snapped an image from approximately 4 billion miles away. In the image below, earth appears as an almost imperceptible white (actually blue) dot amid a scattering of light rays, leading the image to become known as the “Pale Blue Dot.”

Gazing at the image is an interesting exercise in physical perspective. But Sagan took it a step further, writing:

Look again at that 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.

Indeed, a dot that fades into the unfathomable vastness that is our universe.

And yet, it makes me wonder WWST (what would Sagan think) as we drown in the overwhelm of the current cultural, political, economic moment. As we engage in our personal and institutional struggle to retain perspective. As we seek to center ourselves in the face of deep cruelty, callousness, and, indeed, malignance.  I can only think that Sagan might urge us to take a step back – a very very long step to be sure – and remind ourselves of the Pale Blue Dot. Maybe it can provide a small nudge that helps us regroup, re-engage, recommit, and carry on. I’m not sure I know how else to do the work demanded of us now.

Rip

P.S. For those of you having difficulty finding the dot, you’re not alone:

‍