I’m planning to use this space to talk about current events, politics, and liberation–but first, by way of introduction, I’d like to talk about a solar eclipse.
In April of 2024 I bailed on work, loaded a couple of my kids–the two who were willing, available, and old enough for the trip–into our family van, and lit out for Ohio to see a total eclipse of the Sun. It was the last one to take place in the lower 48 states until 2044; I had seen partial eclipses before and found them awe-inspiring, and since my ability to trot the globe is limited by my penchant for service work (i.e., I’m poor) and various chronic illnesses leave me unable to take another 20 years of life for granted, I figured that this might be my last and best shot to witness The Real Deal, and cross it off of the ol’ bucket list.
Short on money and time, I had come up with a plan to see the eclipse as cheaply and quickly as possible. We drove out to Chillicothe, Ohio to stay the night at a little motel roughly two hours outside of the “Zone of Totality,” since most hotels inside the zone itself were fully booked by other eclipse-seekers. The next morning, after a quick stop to see the Hopewell Earthworks–ancient earthen mounds constructed by the pre-Columbian “Hopewell” culture almost 2,000 years ago, which I greatly enjoyed and the kids tolerated more-or-less politely–we drove out to a highway rest stop somewhere between Columbus and Cleveland, where I’d figured we’d be able to beat the crowds and get a fantastic view of the sky.
(Pictured: Kids at the Hopewell Earthworks. Neat!)
The whole thing worked out beautifully. The weather, my primary anxiety, turned out to be perfect, clear and bright with just a few stray clouds. The kids and I played “Exploding Kittens” at one of the picnic tables while we waited, as the rest stop slowly filled with folks who’d had the same idea; gradually, as the eclipse began, a sort of carnival atmosphere started to form, with a couple of Mennonite families grilling food and a few older couples making the rounds to greet people and make sure everyone had “eclipse glasses.” And the totality itself, when it finally arrived! Words fail, but I’ll try:
I remember the sudden chill and the silence, as the little flocks of rest-stop sparrows, crows, and doves stopped their calling and foraging as though confused; I remember the 360-degree sunrise/sunset as darkness fell, and the hush that went over the crowd, and the streetlights flicking on in the parking lot, all at once; I remember the mind-tripping beauty of the Sun’s corona and my excitement at spotting a solar prominence flicking out beyond the dark disc of the moon. Most vividly I remember the awe–a tiny word for such a life-altering feeling–and the simple horror of watching the warm and reliable Sun go out; for those four minutes or so, despite being armed with modern knowledge of what was happening and why, I think I experienced a little taste of what my ancestors might have felt: a cold awareness of my own smallness and the fragility of all our lives in the face of forces and objects more vast than we could ever comprehend, and a thrilling, hideous sense that anything was possible–not in the Disneyfied sense of achieving one’s dreams or reaching for the stars or whatever, but that the world we know, all that man-made order and predictability and even the trusty laws of physics themselves, might suddenly crumble in the face of something else. I remember weeping, and hearing others weep.
(Pictured: The one shitty picture I took during totality. Not great, but it helps me remember the moment.)
And then it was over. The Sun peeked out from behind the occluding moon and was instantly, reassuringly, too bright to look at–and despite having driven over 10 hours for those four minutes, I was more than a little bit glad to head home.
But the thing that really stuck with me on that long and obnoxious drive home, threading through the mountainous backroads of West Virginia in the middle of the night in a doomed attempt to show up on time for work the next day, wasn’t the primitive horror of the disappearing Sun or the simple celestial wonder of seeing its glowing atmosphere with my own eyes for the first time. What I couldn’t stop thinking about was the remarkable fact that I had known to be there in the first place! I have the privilege of living in a time when I can trust so completely in the astronomical predictions of strangers that I would travel hundreds of miles from my home to a rest stop in Ohio, knowing that the eclipse would be there when they said it would, right down to the minute.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for about 300,000 years, I’m told. Herodotus asserted that Thales of Miletus was the first to correctly predict an eclipse in 585 B.C.E.; I tend to doubt that claim in favor of Edmond Halley’s successful forecast of 1715, but either way we can say with confidence that mankind has had its collective head around the idea of the solar eclipse for only a tiny percentage of our history on Earth. For the vast majority of our existence, eclipses have not been occasions for fun, family-oriented road trips like mine–those who witnessed them did so only by chance, and generally found them terrifying and inexplicable. How fortunate I am to live now, in an age of predictable eclipses–and vaccines, and cheap, available food, and near-instant access to the sum of all human knowledge, and all the people I love just a touchscreen away!
Yet even as I appreciate the above, I can’t help but remember the following, and let’s go point by point here: Are you grateful for vaccines? The United States government is now working steadily, for no good reason, to dismantle the system of vaccine development and distribution that has saved countless lives. You think people should have access to food? In the coming year, eight billion or so humans will produce enough food to feed ten billion, yet hundreds of millions of us will starve. And all that “access to the sum of all human knowledge” seems to have served mostly to mire our friends, neighbors, relatives, and fellow citizens in a fetid swamp of lies and distortions–racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theory, fascism, etc.–and to leave us more isolated than ever before. Even flat-eartherism has experienced a dramatic rise in popularity, with as many as 1-2% of Americans (i.e., millions of people!) reporting that they firmly believe the Earth to be flat. I’ve run into these folks before! Some of them have been friends and co-workers, and the most important thing I can say about them, I think, is that none of them were particularly stupid. I have friends and family–kind, gentle, generous people–who voted enthusiastically for new American fascism, despite all my arguing, reasoning, and begging.
I find that quite a bit more chilling than standing in the shadow of the moon.
I’ll be direct: I want a better world. I want to live–and even more I want my children to live–in a society that’s not built top-to-bottom on oppression and exploitation. I want real freedom, for me and for everyone–not the false freedom of America, where you’re free to work your life away to make rich men richer, and they’ll give you a tiny little piece of the value of your labor–just enough to keep a roof over your head and sorta, kinda, pay for food and medicine–but only as long as you agree to keep your head down, say your prayers, and keep your damn mouth shut while your taxes blow up babies on the other side of the world and the new gestapo drags your neighbors away to the camps. I want us to not destroy the biosphere and annihilate 99% of the diversity of life on Earth, and when we do–because, you know, we’re doing it now–I want to use all of our technology and networks of transit and communication to help the millions/billions of people who will die, instead of locking them out to starve as the developed nations of the world are preparing to do now. And if those desires of mine don’t resonate with you–I dunno, man. Fuck off, I guess?
Because what else can I offer you? If I want to build that better world, I need you. I need you to understand that climate change is real, and that immigrants aren’t dangerous or a problem to be solved by “enforcement” of any kind; I must convince you that world-devouring capitalism, like the divine right of kings (to paraphrase one of my favorite authors) can fall–can end, can go away forever! I need you to understand that the grand neoliberal experiment has failed, and must be replaced by something better. I need you to realize that we must act now, because it’s probably already too late.
But when the media can’t be trusted, when disinformation and deceit are everywhere, when our leaders sell us out at every opportunity to ketamine-addled tech bros peddling nonsense-babbling, kiddy-porn generating, job-stealing goofball robots that everyone inexplicably finds convincing–when truth is a firefly, winking for an instant in the darkness of the eclipse, gone again before I can raise my hand to point at it, how do I convince anyone of anything? How do I know that I have anything worth saying in the first place?
This is the question I can’t stop chewing on. I have some thoughts, but I don’t really have an answer; if I did, I wouldn’t be writing. I’ll just say, for now, that if you end up returning to read my words again, you’ll find me engaged in that struggle, and I hope that I’ll keep struggling until I’m dead. But I do have one parting thought for you, to which I return over and over when I’m tempted to despair:
Flat-earthers can’t predict an eclipse, and fascists can’t build anything lasting. I didn’t show up to a rest stop in Ohio with my kids merely because I “trusted in the astronomical predictions of strangers,” although I’ll admit that I didn’t run the math myself. I trusted in something bigger: that the world is real, and knowable. And I was right to do so! You can tell yourself whatever story you want: that the world is flat, that climate change isn’t real, that immigrants are dangerous, that “law enforcement” exists to protect you. But when rubber meets road and shit hits fan, it’s not a question of who has the best story, or who can sell their product in the “marketplace of ideas.” There’s a reality much larger and grander than any story you can tell yourself about it, and I find that fact comforting. You’ll be there to witness the eclipse, or you won’t.
And I might convince you or I might not, but I’m gonna keep working on my lifelong goal, conceived in childhood well before I had any idea where it would lead me, of aligning my stories with the real, knowable world. And I’m gonna trust that it’ll pay off, as it has before, when we stand together in wonder before another total eclipse of the Sun–hopefully, over a better world.
So that’s my perspective! If you’re on board, come back later and read some more. Next time I’m gonna try to take a crack at talking about what the fuck we’re all supposed to do about ICE. (Spoiler: “vote out MAGA, blue wave 2026!” will not be the thesis.)
Till next time,
Alex