GAZETTE COLUMN: IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE by John P. Flannery

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE By John P. Flannery We live a life that is a blink of an eye as compared to the more than 4 Billion years that passed before our mothers sent us down the birth canal into the world as we know it. Our human forbears and our generation and those aborning have only been here for about 150,000 years. But we don’t have much cause to think about this fact, of our temporal insignificance, unless we have a heated argument with someone who thinks the earth has been here for thousands of years rather than billions. I’ve had conversations with some in Loudoun County who believe that the earth is only 8,000 years old because of a sequence of Biblical “begats” that added, one to the other, yield this sum of years and no more. This was a laugh line in the Scopes Monkey Trial. But it’s no laughing matter for many in America. When these folk who believe this nonsense are pressed about the evidence of fossils, carbon dating, layers of sediment, Arctic and Antarctic ice samples that prove that the Earth has been here 4 Billion years and that we humans are recent inhabitants, some have actually said, that “God only makes the earth look older.” (I have not gotten a satisfactory answer as to why the mind of God would “think” to do such a thing – to deceive us – but there it is.) Nor is this bizarre “belief” system an eccentric phenomenon. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a nascent presidential candidate, was recently asked how old the earth is for a magazine article, and reportedly answered, “It’s one of the great mysteries.” Senator Rubio is the same person who compared the teaching of evolution to some form of communistic indoctrination. He prefers creationism that has no scientific antecedents. Plainly some can’t distinguish a religious from a scientific text. And this has its consequences to public policy and what we are doing to protect our children and their children. When geological truths are “a mystery,” then we can’t rightly consider global warming, and how humans prompt this endangerment and how they squander our world’s finite resources. We plainly don’t believe, like our species depended on this fact, that we need to be stewards of this planet, itself a small blue spot in an expanding universe of light and dark masses, electrical and magnetic forces, and barely understood physics, not even when scientific studies indicate that, whatever happened in the history of the universe, the delicate balance of gasses and environmental conditions on this blue cat’s eye marble make human life possible when life may exist nowhere else. We tolerate fossil fuels and fight for the right of coal to burn even as it compromises our very existence. Nor is there any doubt about this fact. Some say the planet cools, like in the ice age, or warms, as now. But it’s more complicated and dangerous than that. It cooled when we had too little Carbon Dioxide and it’s heating when we have too much. This is true as a matter of scientific fact. Not our melting polar caps, retreating shorelines, changing and more violent weather patterns, shifting vegetation, lost species, accumulations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, prompting the greenhouse effect, warming our planet, seems to alarm our world leaders. With about 6.7 Billion humans on the planet, we still have political, community and religious leaders, in the highest rank, inviting even more unplanned parenthood, more unwanted children, as many as possible apparently, expecting the food air and water fairy to provide for these armies of maladapted children – persisting in this wrong-headed fashion until, sooner than we think, everyone on the planet has so little space that they are standing shoulder to shoulder, face to face, unable to move, and then, privacy, freedom and human dignity shall be a distant memory. Even in our County, we’ve observed this indifference to the challenge of sustaining our environment so we may continue to survive. We want to drink clean water but won’t act to clean our streams. We put filters in our home air conditioning systems but don’t fight air pollution. We avoid poisons in our home but support sprays in our gardens and from the air, now fifty years after Rachel Carson first spoke of the adverse health effects in “Silent Spring.” Chief Seattle once famously said, “we belong to the earth,” that “we are but one strand within the web [of life,]” and that “whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” Those who invoke the bible for science would better serve us all if they read it for spiritual guidance instead, including the commandments, particularly the Eighth Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not steal,” for we are the future eaters, and, if we fail to act, we steal the future from our children, even as we say that we care for them – and that nothing’s more important than our children and grand-children.