Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that!

I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out.

We called our continent something special.

But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off.

But today we act as if there were something deeply permanent about being North Americans, or Asians, Europeans, or whatever. We have bumped into each other before. And slid apart, and back together. Politically, it is as if we want to find some great and glorious differences in standing where we do: on our edge of what used to be common territory.

Politically, economically, culturally, we are just human beings, riding very slow-moving rafts of rock and dirt.

Those are our relatives!

But these are tough times. Maybe we should all send each other back to where we came from.

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