Why do you think babies cry when they exit the womb? Because they don’t want to leave the security of floating weightlessly in the warm ooze that granted them life, but they are forced to take in the new world’s air. Tethered to our moms, we are free in our primordial atmosphere—at least, until we are ejected against our will into the cold, harsh world we unconditionally grow to accept. And aren’t we all now grown and looking for something warm and cozy to counter our troubling environment?
I look in the sky on this hot summer night and see a faint speck of light becoming more and more faint by the second. It is a high tech device, Sputnik-like, more advanced than any regular plane. There is a little man in there. He sits in his cockpit consoled by a padded suit and the fact that there is no one dirty there to peeve him. All of the ship’s controls are within reach of his grubby hands. He knows what he is doing. His destination is the moon.
He is too large and scrubbed clean for Earthling soil. He is exiting Earth and its societies to prospect his own world in an cushioned anti-gravitational frontier, a world all his own. One mother is returned to while another is left to rot.
Once there, he will be able to survey his home planet from a distance farther than most could imagine being in their lifetimes. He will see what space junk scraps see when they drift by, not swayed enough by gravity to make a crash landing. He will see a planet that lies in his perpetual grip, but only then will he be able to create the physical illusion that he is holding it, like how he squished peoples’ heads from afar as a grade schooler. He will see a planet in dismay. Maybe he will see the fires raging across the land from space when they were not included in his earthly penthouse view. He will think of all the little people who would do anything to spacewalk in his boots and how they will never be able to touch him.
In his mind he remains afloat forever, cultivating his own society free from Earth’s clutches, one where only the purest and most accumulous are permitted. Scientific understanding and discovery play no part when he has already discovered the truest depths of human selfishness. But these visions exist only within his dampest dreams, and he must return to reality sooner or later. He would never want to risk looking different than you or me.
Shame that those who need to get pulled down to Earth most, are the only ones who hold the means to escape it’s gravitational pull.
