An Homage to Space

I would love to become an amateur astronomer.  I've never had a telescope, never lived in an area of the country where the night sky looks anything like this and have only seen a lunar eclipse (that I can remember with any vividness) once but I think I could do it.  Granted, I know nothing about telescopes, or where to point the thing to actually see something but I figure I could find something on the internet about it.  Which brings me to this little list of things in space that I love.  Starting with, perhaps, the most obvious of things in our sky:

The Moon - Our closest celestial neighbor (most of the time) in more ways than one.  I guess the moon is just kind of...well...the moon.  We've all grown up with it, lived with it, seen a gagillion pictures of it but it's also the only place not on this Earth that human beings have ever been.  It's our first step out into a whole new era in human history.  Without this little gem in the night sky, it's possible that life would have never been.  After all, the moon is us, most likely created from a large impact that sent this piece of the Earth sailing billions of years ago.  

Andromeda - Our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor in the cosmos at a mere 2.5 million light years and closing.  Andromeda has always featured in our night sky because it's so bright, but what makes Andromeda so interesting to me is the rate at which it is approaching the Milky Way and our little solar system.  In about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are expected to collide.  I have no idea what will happen when the collision occurs, but many scientists expect the galaxies to merge and became a gargantuan eliptical galaxy.  

  Colliding Galaxies - A glimpse into the future, here is a snapshot of a couple of galaxies in the process of collision.  We're actually looking at a couple of things here.  The colliding galaxies are at the top of the picture which, admittedly, looks like a mess of gas and stars and is difficult to distinguish one from the other (which makes sense if they're colliding).  The separate galaxy at the bottom is actually no where near the colliding galaxies and the trail of gas and dust in between the two pictures is somewhere over 100 light years long.

Exoplanets - An artist's rendition of the nearest exoplanet we know of that orbits nearby (about 10.5 light years) Epsilon Eridani.  I'm always overly thrilled by the discovery of new exoplanets, probably because I'm still waiting for that one definite sign of life (flashlight in hand) outside of our own terra firma.  A man can dream...

Horsehead Nebula - Properly known as Barnard 33, the Horsehead Nebula represents a curious and very human tendency to imagine things where they aren't.  I'm not sure if that's because we have a need to find the familiar in the stunningly alien or if it's just some odd sense of vanity left over from thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, either way, it strikes me that we tend to do the same things with nebulae that we do with clouds on Earth.

Binary Stars - Perhaps because we live and exist in a single star system, I've always been fascinated by the existence of binary star systems.  In this picture we see two white dwarfs orbiting each other at the astonishingly shrinking speed of 321 seconds.  Eventually, they'll merge together and create a new stellar body.  Not all binary systems are doing this, some are in stable orbits and their planetary systems can orbit the gravitational center of the primary star and its companion star or just one of the binary stars.  It's all quite the dance.

Hubble Space Telescope - There's no better way to end this list than by paying homage to the thing that has given humanity its eye into the universe.  Most of the images in this post and most of the images of space we've seen comes from this single object.  Hubble has lifted the veil on nearly 15 billion light years worth of space and time.  It is, in a very real sense, our very own time machine and human knowledge will forever be indebted to it's magical mirrors.  

Yeah, space makes me want to be a poet.

An Homage to Earth and Earthling

I spent a good chunk of time in my formative undergraduate years in the concrete confines of Temple Hall.  Partly because it had a cozy nook at the ground level which I used for various study sessions and last minute reading and also because I minored in Geography.  I know, you thought that was a class you took in middle school, but apparently some people will let you get a degree in the subject. Geography allowed me to take my love of maps and topographic features to new, incredibly geeky, heights.  Here's just a few pictures of some of my favorite and most interesting things on Earth.

Mount Roraima - Is part of a larger plateau that marks the converging borders of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela.  Mount Roraima is the highest elevation in that plateau chain.  Mountains have shaped the history and spread of human culture for the entirety of our short history on Earth.

Merapi - A stratovolcano in Indonesia known for some nasty eruptions complete with pyroclastic flows.  Beautifully deadly, the Javanese culture believe it to be the home of two spirits, Empu Rama and Empu Permadi. 

Cahokia, Monk's Mound - It may look quaint (and perhaps a bit unspectacular) but Cahokia was an ancient Native American city and this mound is the third largest pyramid in the world (by volume).  Cahokia serves as a reminder that cultures and civilizations use what is available to them.  The Mississippian culture didn't have ready access to iron or stone which is why there was no "iron-age" and their pyramids weren't made of stone which, in turn, is one of the reasons many people thought/think their civilization so "primitive"...this is incorrect.  It's population was larger than London at the time (c. 1250 CE) and the engineering that went into building the city would have rivaled anywhere else in the world.

An artist's rendering of Cahokia in it's prime, Monk's Mound being the big pyramid.  You can also see "woodhenge" on the left of the rendering which is reproduced at the site of Cahokia today.

Masai Mara National Reserve - The most well-known and acclaimed African reserve, Masai Mara also carries the distinction of maintaining a functioning Masai culture in the bounds of the reserve.  It's an interesting  contrast to the American notion of wilderness and nature in National Parks that maintains an absence of human settlement.

Aral Sea - The Aral Sea today is less than a fifth the size it was in the 60's when the Soviet Union began damming rivers that emptied into the sea.  The environmental degradation that resulted from human decisions stands as one of Earth's most poignant reminders of the ability of humans to affect this little planet.

A side by side comparison from 1977, 1989 and 2006.

Mount Washington - As mountains go, Washington isn't particularly high nor does it display any spectacularly original features.  What Washington is home to, however, is some of the most erratic weather ever recorded on Earth.  Temperatures have been recorded as low as -50 (that's without a wind chill) and the mountain held the record for highest surface wind speed at 231 mph from 1934 to 1996.  Things can get hairy up there.  

I imagine, for the majority of human beings, geography isn't the most stimulating of topics but the impact our world has on human interaction and vice versa should remind us of the power that place has on the human psyche.  To this day my first drive up a mountain still stands out in my memory.  It was the middle of summer in Colorado and we were able to drive high enough to find snow sitting on the ground.  I had found my paradise (I love snow).  Anyway, geography (and sometimes even geology...but only sometimes) is cool.  

Disclaimer: Most of the images were just google searched.  I was once told something about being a great writer and stealing from other people and that being okay.  I'm not a great writer so please don't sue me or shut down my little blog.

Classism and Other Easier Ways for White People to Talk Around Racism

Classism [noun] a biased or discriminatory attitude based on distinctions made between social or economic classes.

It seems in our "post-racial" America we are finding more and better ways to circumvent any real conversations about race in the public sphere.  We have a black president now which, apparently, magically alleviates our society of any need for reconciliation.  And because of that faulty assumption, so prevalent in certain corners of public discourse, talking about race in any way that does not conform to "color blind" rhetoric becomes taboo.  Suffice it to say, if you think a "color blind" society would solve all of our problems, you're probably white and spend time convincing yourself and others that you're not racist because you have a black friend.

Classism is the new racism for white America.  And it's a convenient way for white Americans to frame their understanding of inequality because, for an overwhelming number of us, it alleviates our feelings of guilt and/or paranoia over the reality of inequity in this country.  Most of us aren't rich so we can justify becoming righteously indignant over wealth parity.  We can talk about the increasing concentration of wealth (which equals political speech! Thanks Supreme Court!) without having to face our own staggering inability to understand the part we play in the systems of disadvantage we accept.  The word doesn't hit us like racism does.  It doesn't convict us or make us squirm or react so defensively when it is used in our presence.  No, no.  You see, we are the "middle-class" and we are normal, everyday, human beings.  We stand for middle class sensibilities.  We're the backbone of the American economy.

The problem with shifting the conversation from racism to classism so that we can "move beyond" the narrow focus of racism is that classism is still a system of disadvantage and privilege predicated on race.  It might be easier to talk about, it might be less threatening, it might not be full of so many uncomfortable conversations but that's the thing about Euphemism, easier to talk about with a healthy dose of disingenuousness thrown in for the sake of feelings.  I want to stress that I'm in no way implying that classism doesn't exist or that it doesn't disadvantage certain groups of people but I cannot accept arguments and conversations that treat classism as if wealth was the only thing standing between equality and disparity in this country.  Thus, a chart (from an interesting study):

It's pretty clear we're not just talking about wealth as the problem or, more accurately, that wealth is the all encompassing lynch-pin in the understanding of American disparity.  We're talking about red-lining and the lack of inclusion for minorities during the economic recovery of the Great Depression.  We're still talking about systems of disadvantage that have been orchestrated and maintained by white America.  And to a large part, I feel like we're still talking about the pathology of privilege that continues to feed on the fears of middle-class white America.  This well-known scene from Lee Mun Wah's The Color of Fear helps illustrate this pathology a bit:

So, we exist in a culture where the majority culture (power) has been willing to accept and promulgate (sometimes through ignorance) systems of disadvantage in which they readily benefit.  These systems are largely ignored and overlooked by the group that is implementing them because we have the privilege of not having to deal with their consequences and can continue to live in a state of ignorance.  And now, in this most recent economic downturn, white America has been unwittingly hit by these systems that have been used for so long to privilege their own.  We have experienced a piece of the disadvantage that our brothers and sisters of color have been living with and have known about for most, if not all, of their lives (and we've incorrectly placed the blame of this problem on our black president, a bastardization of the truth that so complete that if I were to actually call it racist in public I would be laughed out of the room).  And although it has come primarily in the form of economic hardship, it should provide us with a moment to reflect upon all the systems of advantage and disadvantage we navigate and negotiate in this country every day of our lives.  It provides us with an opportunity to raise our own consciousness, to challenge the fear and paranoia we accept into our narrative and accept the experiences of life in America that those with black skin and red skin and yellow skin have endured.

Yes classism is a legitimate problem.  Yes its reach can be felt across ethnic lines in society.  But to try and talk about classism without also addressing racism does us all a disservice.  It's a convenient way to gloss over the true lay of the land and a white-washing of the realities of experience in America.  It would be easy for us to latch onto classism as the explanation for the current climate of America's economy but my feeling is it would only serve to rob us of the opportunity to identify the fear we've agreed to live with, the fear that keeps us from accepting the voices of American experience that differ wildly from our own.