I saw the moons of Jupiter last night.

alberg

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Tue Oct-26-10 10:04 AM
Original message

I saw the moons of Jupiter last night.

The same moons Galileo saw. I walked outside in a clear Autumn night and pointed my 10 power binoculars at that bright point of light in the south eastern sky and there they were: tiny white dots circling a planet that is itself circling a star called Sol – the star at the center of our solar system

I watched in amazement and imagined I could almost see them move. And in fact, if I come back tonight I will see that they’ve moved – shifted their relative positions around Jupiter. I can see this fact with my own eyes by simply looking up – the fact of a planet with its own moons circling the same star that we circle, in a universe so vast that we cannot really comprehend it. Human knowledge has brought us this far. We actually have a dim grasp of where we are and some conception of what our place in it all might be.

And yet, in this political season it’s easy to forget all that. Science – what does that mean? Evolution – that can’t be true because “I’ve never seen a monkey turn into a man”. And so 5000 years if painstaking intellectual progress is thrown aside in pursuit if a sound bite and a few percentage points in a vote poll.

My friends tell me that they cannot believe it. They never thought that it could regress this badly. And it could not; it would never have except with the collusion of a media who have failed in their responsibility as Journalists and have settled instead for tabloid sensationalism and propaganda.

Galileo was threatened with torture for telling the truth about the moons of Jupiter. That was his crime. He could look up into the night sky, just like me tonight, and see them circling another heavenly body. Not earth. Not the Sun. And by stating this simple fact he challenged the world order – the central place that the civil authorities and the church had established for themselves in the center of a universe they invented, controlled and defined. And so Galileo must be silenced.

Just as in our own times, the apostles of free market, disaster capitalism continue to assert their ideology no matter what the facts actually are. History and our all too recent economic experience have proven that an equitable, just and humane society cannot be built exclusively around human greed. Regulations, oversight and shared accountability are essential in any society worth living in. But no matter all that. Free Markets and Tax Breaks solve all the problems. Do away with Regulation. Privatize everything. Abolish all social services. The rich and the powerful will always find a way to survive. The center of their universe lies in an exclusive place that only includes the elites. The rest of humanity – well they’ll just have to suffer the consequences.

And yet the moons of Jupiter are up there still – hundreds of years after Galileo’s ordeal. They still circle a planet - not our own - around a star that is lost in the countless stars of this universe that we call home.

Truth is truth and lies are lies.

The truth is out there.

And all around us, if we can just keep our eyes open.