I’ve been writing this column on mental health in America for a year, and, uh, what a ride it has been. It’s kind of like if I were to be riding shotgun with Death at the wheel, while Pestilence and War making out in the backseat. Famine’s in the rearview, but it’s catching up fast, if climate change is any indication. Awesome. We’re all doing great here.
This is why I’d like to take a break from this particular race into the unknown and take a look at the stars. And talk to you about our definition of “crazy.”
Very recently, the Jerusalem Post published an article that can right off the bat be labeled as “crazy.” It quotes Haim Eshed, an 87-year-old former Israeli space security chief, as saying aliens are real, they’re in contact with the U.S. government and the Israeli government, and that Trump was going to blab all about it, but the aliens convinced him to not do that (how? Did they offer him a lifetime supply of wigs and taco meat? Your guess is as good as mine).
Arguably, the craziest part of the story is Eshed’s statement that the aliens and Americans have a joint base on Mars already. I mean, how the hell would that work with regards to the federal budget?
On the other hand, Harry Reid has made statements that broadly echo Eshed’s. The Navy won’t say that aliens are real, but it says UFOs are. Something is definitely up, and while it doesn’t convince me of the existence of a benevolent Galactic Federation that just wants humans to be “ready” to accept alien life just yet, I do see a certain vector beginning to change. Maybe it’s just 2020. Maybe it’s my own obsession, as a reader, with physics and seeing a grand design in everything.
Either way, I think it’s OK to admit that reality is not what it used to be. And to also admit that “crazy” has many applications, not all of them bad. Sometimes, “craziness” is a mere flexibility of the mind.
This year has really, truly fucked with the way we engage the world. To be honest, it’s even fucked with our perception of time. Lockdowns have a way of doing that, and so do isolation and fear and the feeling that the old order of things is beginning to buckle. I write this to you while not fully comprehending that it is, in fact, December 2020, when it still feels like a never-ending March, for example. Perhaps it just goes to show that the scientists I worship are right when they say that it’s perception that shapes reality, and not the other way around.
What I’m saying is this: I don’t know if aliens are real and if they are benevolent. I would like to think that they are, if only because an empty universe, to reference “Contact,” really does seem like a big waste of space AND because a Star Trek future for humanity is one that I would like to believe in.
Wanting something is not the same thing as getting it, though. And that’s OK too. The important thing is to hope for better outcomes, especially in a time like this. To say, “I am open to the idea that things can get better for us all.” Maybe what we really need right now is a hint of a possibility that aliens exist, if only we can feel closer to each other after all. If only we can fall back on the notion that there is such a thing as a shared humanity — and it’s facing a new and interesting and potentially terrifying frontier, regardless of aliens’ ultimate existence.
That does sound like an incredibly insane line to utter at the end of a year like 2020. But many other hopeful human ideas were called equally insane in their time.
Image credit: Luca Castellazzi