vol. 4 issue 23
Greetings,
Not for the first time, I saw a UFO this week.
What was novel about my experience was 1) I saw it during the day and 2) I wasn’t alarmed by it so much as delighted, which is to say, I’ve come to think that it’s not abnormal to view our race and planet as a blip in a larger context, rather than as the highest of the highs.
Long-time subscribers to docu-mental, might recall how during the pandemic lockdown, I wrote a lot about my migrating bird sightings in a subsection I called “Window over Washington” (feel free to search the archives). Well, it’s that time of year again, which is why I was out with my binoculars, laying atop a picnic table in a national park, observing a kettle of migrating hawks rather high up — higher than I had ever been able to observe — riding atop a thermal near the Potomac River.
And that is when I saw a tiny white Tic Tac type of shape zoom by so fast, even higher up than the birds, that I couldn’t possibly keep up my eye on it in the endless blue for more than a few seconds.
The experience got me thinking about past reflections I have made in this publication about the folly of systematic hierarchical thinking in a universe so vast we do not know what we do not know; but to continually describe hierarchy’s detrimental impact increasingly bores me.
That’s not because it’s untrue, or even unimportant — it is both true to say routinized hierarchy is ultimately lethal and that it is important to negate it as policy and procedure — but what was once a personally enormous “A-ha!” has now become for me so obvious that when I talk about it, I feel a little bit like I am saying, “Hey! Did you know the sun will come up in the East?”
In fact, I have thought a lot about hierarchy, and thought about it hard. To that end, and here’s something from the archives:
My curiosity was piqued, however, when I saw this nifty little craft that very well could be so far advanced that even if I were taken on board, I would have no ability to comprehend what I was witnessing. It got me thinking about what makes humans humans. Is it our technological prowess? Unlikely. It is something that needn’t be developed because it’s already intrinsic to who we are.
And that brought my attention to the horror of Putin’s romping, stomping murderous spree through the Ukraine, and the incomprehensible destruction of the hurricane on Florida’s western coast.
Each of these events feature people who are powerless to stop what is befalling them. Yet, the network of human choices that led up to each catastrophe cannot be discounted. Which is to say, humans have the power to make choices that in the aggregate do not equate with so much destruction.
That we persist in using something so powerful as free will to hurt ourselves and one another as we do must provide endless fascination for whomever it is that not only I, but top-level officials and scientists in this nation and all over the globe, are increasingly aware have an interest in observing about us.
What I hope these unknown visitors also observe is our unfailing instinctual — that is to say, our undeniable — capacity to care for one another.
I hope we increasingly choose to see that first and foremost, too.
Peace,
Whitney
ICYMI:
One of docu-mental’s most read posts:
And “Part 2: What makes Blacks the soul of our nation?” is still to come later this month.