Most people who fire off profane or embarrassing messages do it after a long night of boozing and wake up full of regret. Not President Donald Trump, who doesn’t even drink. Perfectly sober, he was comfortable dropping the f-bomb on Easter morning and calling his adversaries “bastards” while Christians around the world celebrate their holiest day.
May we now retire the fiction that Trump was chosen by God to lead the nation. Trump didn’t even place his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in as president for the second time. Compare his behavior with the exalted comments from the four Artemis II astronauts, whose perspectives, I think we can agree, are on a higher plane than those of the man who once bragged of grabbing women beneath the waist.
Whether a function of TACO Tuesday — Trump always chickens out — or of real negotiations, the United States did not flatten Iran, nor destroy all its bridges and grids as the president had threatened. A two-week ceasefire was mutually acceptable, Trump announced just before his 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, while the two nations seek a meeting of the minds. We’ll see. The strait, meanwhile, remains effectively closed, as Israel continued bombing Lebanon, and Iran accused the U.S. of violating the ceasefire.
On the same day Trump was threatening to commit war crimes and destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, America’s cosmic voyagers were journeying far from Earth as they, too, celebrated not just their mission to fly near the moon but the cornerstone of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus. The juxtaposition of these starkly different worldviews was both instructive and edifying, if flickeringly.
The astronauts traveled to the far side of the moon while Trump traveled to the dark depths of his own soul. He threatened on Tuesday not only destruction but civilian suffering on a grand scale — to wipe out “a whole civilization.” There is no greater evil. What did he think might happen after he destroyed an ancient civilization, indeed, one of the greatest in human history? A standing ovation at The Hague? A Nobel Peace Prize? Control of the planet? Perhaps that last one but surely no other.
Trump’s egomania knows no limits. He slaps his name everywhere he can, brags about his “intelligence” and boasts of his largely ill-begotten wealth. He represents everything well-raised children were taught not to be or do. He is utterly lacking in the crucial Christian traits of humility and empathy.
I’m not by nature a sermonizer, notwithstanding my compulsion to fashion opinions. But neither am I immune to God’s winks and those moments when the thin veil between the seen and unseen ripples with the faintest breath and allows glimpses of the divine. Nevertheless, I’m apt to play dead when well-intentioned believers wish to share their personal revelations.
Thus, I was surprised by a slight shiver when the astronauts spoke of their experiences of the “overview effect,” the life-altering shift in perspective from seeing Earth from space. A God’s-eye view, perhaps. I was spellbound. Astronaut Victor Glover said it was clear to him that we Earthlings are special.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “And from up here, you also look like one thing; Homo sapiens is all of us. No matter where you’re from or what you look like — we’re all one people.”
When about to lose radio contact for roughly 40 minutes, as expected, Glover spoke of Jesus and “one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love.” Glover talked about Jesus’ call to love your neighbor as yourself and said he could feel “love from Earth,” and “to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth — we love you from the moon.”
Before takeoff, when a reporter asked the crew what they thought about flying by the moon during Easter, commander Reid Wiseman nodded to the wider world. “We have our own different opinions, our own individual opinions and our own individual beliefs,” he said, gesturing to his fellow astronauts. “As we have said from the beginning, we really are for all, by all, and we want to take the whole world along with us.” Wiseman noted that the Muslim holiday, Ramadan, ended less than a month before Easter. Passover, the Jewish holiday, also took place during the flight.
If the view from above is that Christians, Jews and Muslims are one, then maybe we should take their word for it. And mind our own spaceship, planet Earth, which is a rare gem suspended in a dark, celestial void — a gift from God, or however one defines the mystery of creation. As trustees for a mere instant, our mission is to protect life in all its forms.
One needn’t hitch a rocket ride to know these things. They are self-evident. Equally so is that Donald Trump is a danger to the world and should be stopped by any legal means. A little space travel might be in order, Mr. Musk? Trump might benefit from the overview effect to better align his self-image with reality. As for the astronauts, we love you, too — to the moon and back.
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