"The Earth and every living thing are made of star stuff." from Star Stuff by Stephanie Roth Sisson
Humans divide themselves into usually tidy labels and categories: Southerner or Midwesterner, rap or jazz, Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Fallon, Colonial or mid-century ranch. It's our very own checklist of who we are or imagine ourselves to be. We group ourselves by zip codes, religion, voting habits, ancestry, and income levels. Book groups may be made up of like-minded people who only read 18th century English literature or science fiction. And how many Thanksgiving dinners have been made tense when that otherwise quiet uncle or sister-in-law suddenly explodes into a political rant...which happens to be the exact opposite view of every other member of the family?
"We are all connected; to each other biologically; to the Earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe, atomically. Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us." Neil deGrasse Tyson
How often do we remind ourselves that we are all made of stars?
It's gotten harder to understand our neighborhoods, states, country or even ourselves. Breaking news comes at us faster, louder with bickering pundits 24 hours a day. Podcasts. Twitter. Facebook. We try to sort it out and decide where we fit in. Is this normal, we ask. And how will it all end? We worry. We get angry. We pledge to read more, to vote.
How often do we remind ourselves that we are all made of stars?
"It takes light from distant stars billions of years to reach Earth. By the time it gets here, the stars are billions of years older than they were when the light left them. So we really see the stars as they used to be. Looking at the stars is like looking into the past." Mary Pope Osbourne - Magic Tree House Fact Tracker Space
Maybe some of our questions will be answered by looking backwards. History has a way of helping to sort out the present and, perhaps, shaping the future. Our human nature being what it is, we certainly aren't the first people to feel as though we've tumbled awake, groggily asking what happened or what's wrong (expletives optional).
And how often do we remind ourselves that we are all made of stars?
"A star is basically a clump of fusing gases giving off light." C. Saucier - Explore the Cosmos
Suggested Reading
Letter from Birmingham Jail - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
1968 - Mark Kurlansky
Hue 1968 - Mark Bowden
Team of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin
Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris
Undaunted Courage - Stephen Ambrose
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman
What If? - Robert Cowley (editor)
The Suffragette - Sylvia Pankhurst, Emmeline Pankhurst
Twenty Years at Hull House - Jane Addams
The Complete Works of Nellie Bly - Nellie Bly
A Vindication of the Rights of Women - Mary Wollstonecraft
A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
Playing With Fire - Lawrence O'Donnell
Grant - Ron Chernow
The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal,and Hysteria in 1692 Salem - Stacy Schiff
The American Spirit - David McCullough
Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
And the Band Played On - Randy Shilts
The Civil War - Shelby Foote
The Story of Civilization - Will & Ariel Durant (11 volumes)
How the Scots Invented the Modern World - Arthur Herman
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Havari
The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization - Martin Puchner
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