Living on Mars among alien creatures…

January 5th, 2009

I’m not talking about the interesting TV show, Life on Mars, but an Einstein quote from a letter he wrote in 1933 to a professional musician living in Germany:

I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy…Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich’s surroundings.   Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interests in the actions of these creatures.   Make friends with a few animals.   Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.

Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone — and necessarily so — and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.

This is with regard to the rise of Nazism, of course, but unfortunately I often feel that it must too often be true everywhere in the world still today, and that I do live on Mars among alien creatures.   I want to be engaged and empathetic toward my fellow humans, but so many hold such powerful irrational beliefs and cannot set them aside or acknowledge their own problems even in the harsh light of reason.

We’ve got the Palestinians upset about an invasion when they can’t stop attacking Israel, and will now seek revenge for something they provoked, the rest of the world upset with Israel because they won’t settle for making a minor attack instead of trying to stomp out a serious continuing threat, and the all-too Martian tit-for-tat escalating into destruction even though both sides have lost more than they’ve won.

We’ve got rape victims getting killed to protect family honor.

We’ve got people for political or religious reasons rejecting meritorious scientific positions that aim to educate our children about how the world really works and to warn us of impending disasters.

We’ve got hate mongers with audiences of millions carrying on about how liberals are traitors, about how the Japanese Internment Camps during World War II were a good idea, about how Obama is a terrorist-sympathizer and how his wife hates America.

We’ve got Catholics leadership lying about the effectiveness of condoms and arguing that the solution to the AIDS crisis is their personal brand of faith, not anything actually shown to work (like condoms).

We’ve got people frothing at the mouth and calling same-sex marriage the worst threat to America today, equating it to bestiality, child molestation, and worse.

We’ve got people who take their horoscopes seriously, who watch TV shows where charlatans claim to talk to the dead, and spend money on consulting psychics.

We’ve got people who are not concerend about the environment because the end times are approaching, and Presidents who invite them to visit him in the White House.

We’ve got women breaking hips during childbirth because their bones are weak from vitamin D deficiency, because they cover themselves from head to toe whenever they go outside in the sunlight, lest they incite lust in men who have access to as much hardcore porn they care to watch.

We’ve got innocent and incompetent people being put to death by the state, teenagers sentenced to 10 years in prison for being on the receiving end of consensual acts, and people being arrested for drunk driving while sleeping it off in the backseats of their parked cars.

We’ve got relgious fundamentalsts of most stripes telling us how to live and plotting ways to kill us if we don’t follow their ridiculous ideas.

We’ve got fast food to supersize our bodies, TV to shrink our minds, Paris Hilton and her amazing friends doing the most outrageous things to distract us from…her dog is named “Tinkerbell” and it really is so cute, I can’t understand why she gets in trouble, and what was that with Brittney’s hair?

…wait, what was I talking about?

Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.