It’s a big universe there

In December 1985, I made my first post-war trip to Vietnam. I had been there in 1967 as an 18 year old Marine which turned out to be a terrible idea and a life changing experience. Eighteen years later, I wanted to see and experience the country of Vietnam, not the Vietnam War. It turned out to be both a journey of humility and healing.

Very early on, my interpreter, a young man old enough to remember the war but not old enough to have fought in it, asked me if I had been injured. When I said yes, then explained that I had received a few small shrapnel wounds and hearing loss, he shrugged and said calmly, “Oh”. Obviously, to him my “injuries” didn’t matter, purple heart medal or not.

Later, we visited the War Crimes Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. It contains several rooms dealing with the American war, but many other rooms dealing with Pol Pot, the old regime in Saigon, Thailand, the French colonial era and the struggle of several millennia with China. (An even more elaborate museum in Hanoi also details this long history of resisting Chinese rule. The American War is not even mentioned in this museum.)

Even a quick study of history clearly shows that things don’t always get better. Ask the Egyptians. Or the Romans. And the sun never set on the British Empire.

For eighteen years I had imagined that the Vietnam War was something that had happened to me. I was the star of the show. But on this trip, I realized that I was an infinitely insignificant part of something much, much bigger. Of course, the war was not about me. In fact, the American War itself was hardly a pimple on a pumpkin in Vietnam’s long history. The experience forced me to rethink my whole relationship with Vietnam and this war.

Fast forward thirty-six years. We are in 2021. Donald Trump has been kicked out of the White House, but refuses to admit defeat. Dozens of supposedly responsible politicians at the federal, state and local levels – as well as TV and radio spokespersons – continue to reiterate his claim that the election was stolen by sneaky and complicit Democrats. Millions of American citizens believe this to be true.

Meanwhile, Senator Joe Munchkin (who lines his pockets and his family’s pockets with money from fossil fuels) and Senator Kyrsten Cinemax (God only knows what’s going on in his head) are the best allies. that Moscow Mitch McConnell and his retrumplican pals could wish for. for, making it ridiculously easy for their task to impede any progress the Biden administration might have made in repairing this grotesquely damaged nation.

And so it seems almost inevitable that the slim Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the evenly divided parties in the Senate will both move in favor of Republicans in 2022. And that, combined with the number of Republican state legislatures passing Restrictive election laws that ensure large numbers of poor people and people of color are disenfranchised, means Donald Trump himself – or someone dangerously smarter than him – will be back in the White House in 2024.

Add to that our already radically right-wing Supreme Court, the militarization of our national police force, the insane gun laws in this country, a few other junk, and, to put it bluntly, we’re screwed. .

Recently a friend told me that things are going to get worse before they get better. But even a quick study of history clearly shows that things don’t always get better. Ask the Egyptians. Or the Romans. And the sun never set on the British Empire.

In 1776 Edward Gibbon published The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Will someone write someday The decline and fall of the American Empire? Then again, with global warming on the way, we may not last long enough for anyone to write this book.

Indeed, all of this angst about the United States of America could be wasted energy in light of the looming global catastrophe that seems even less inevitable than a Republican Congress in 2022. What are the odds that the the whole human race manages to change the way we live enough to ward off the future terminal that awaits this planet and all that is on it? Talk about being fucked up.

Ah, but there is another way of looking at it all, and it goes back to what I learned in Vietnam in 1985: humility. Put things in perspective.

Not long ago I watched a show on PBS’s Nova about the Milky Way. Our galaxy contains 100 billion stars. Ours is a star – a tiny little star – in the middle of it all.

And the universe itself, NASA estimates, contains at least 200 billion galaxies. Not stars. Galaxies. This translates into a number of stars, more or less like the one we see in our skies every day, or the equivalent of something like the number of grains of sand on each beach on Earth. Try to think of this number.

New stars are born every minute and old stars die every minute. This has been going on for something on the order of thirteen and a half billion years. It has been 13,500,000,000,000 years. It’s going to go on for, well, God only knows how much longer, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a very long time.

Much longer than Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be here. Much longer than the United States of America will be here. Much longer than planet Earth will be here. Or good old Sol, our beloved Sun. We think it’s all up to us, but it’s not. It never has been. It never will be. The universe doesn’t really care about us. He does his own thing.

I find it both humiliating and heartwarming.

WD Ehrhart