I didn’t pay much attention as the dome of sky was changing. Yes, occasionally, I looked up and took notice of a darkening night sky, but I did so without assessing how many of the stars I knew during my childhood had faded or altogether disappeared. Looking back, I realize they left the sky one-by-one, hundreds disappearing as I focused my attention on mundane stuff over the decades of my adulthood.
The Past’s Night Sky
I grew up in a small town of about 15 or 16 thousand people, where even in my city neighborhood at night in the 1940s and 1950s, I could look up to see stars, many of them. And then I grew up, married, and my wife and I moved into the countryside outside an even smaller town, one that was half the population of my hometown but that has since dwindled to about an eighth of the population it was upon our arrival.
Rural and countryside: The words conjure images of starry night skies. But not so. Over the decades of our residency and during the local population decline, I took note on occasion that my once wooded property gradually seemed to lie under a hazy glow on the horizon and rather dark dome arcing above. Now, the stars have all but disappeared. Some of the brightest stars occasionally dot the dome, and Orion’s Belt is prominent on cold clear winter nights. Of course, the bright planets are still there; the moon, too. But gone is that starry sky of my childhood and the early years of rural life. Like youth turned to middle and then to old age, the change occurred unnoticed until it was noticeable. One night I looked up and realized what was missing.
And that same kind of insidious and hardly noticed disappearance is at work in fading American freedoms. If the trend continues, we’ll awaken to find ourselves living beneath the dark dome of a socialist government, our freedoms gone like those stars of my childhood, our privacy gone, our individual wealth gone. Ensuing generations of children will know neither the twinkling lights of the universal dome nor the pinpoint brilliance of five freedoms: 1) The freedom to speak one’s mind, 2) The freedom to move about, 3) The freedom to control one’s own destiny, 4) The freedom to question anything and anyone at any time, and 5) The freedom to own.
Germini in Mono Lake
If you’ve never visited Mono Lake at nighttime, I recommend putting it on your bucket list. Clear desert sky, placid alkaline water, both shielded from city lights by mountains to their west. When it’s their turn to occupy the sky, Castor and Pollux shine so brightly that one can see them reflected by the surface of the dark water. It’s the sky on Earth. The twins become quadruplets. The nighttime visitor sees the sky below as well as above. Lights above and lights below; stars all around.
That’s an analog of how I saw freedoms during my youth, freedoms everywhere one looked, freedoms that have undergone a gradual disappearance that I, like so many other Americans, failed to notice.
How did we lose the night sky? An obvious answer is that we electrified for convenience and pleasure. We artificially extended day into night, more so than the tilt of our planet does for the Northern Hemisphere between the winter and summer solstices. Ease has been a human goal unattainable by our ancient ancestors. Ease is easily obtained now, a flick of a switch. And we have extended that goal into dependence, to a life of ease dependent upon others who will care for our needs. And chief among the caretakers are the government bureaucrats and their amorphous agencies grown so large that they envelop us from every angle, much as the stars seem to do for the nighttime visitor to Mono Lake, where the sky appears to lie below as much as it lies above.
My Failure—and Maybe Yours
I have never done anything to save the stars. They kept disappearing; occasionally, I noticed the changing sky, but and in fact, I believe I have contributed to their disappearance. I have security lights. I have a lamppost. I bleed photons skyward from my house and property. My rural neighbors also bleed photons. The small villages in the township bleed photons, the cumulative effect of which, coupled to car headlights, bathes the local heavens in a dull haze and erases stars once visible near the horizon. Some 16,000 years ago, the residents of the rock shelter called Meadowcroft about an hour's drive from my house would have seen about 3000 stars on the inside of the sky dome when they stepped beyond the protective fire at the shelter’s entrance.
Granted, I would not like to have lived 16 millennia ago. Harsh life. Dangerous life. Not a life of ease. Would the glorious night sky have made up for the hardships of sustaining life as a hunter-gatherer among bears and wolves? Not from my well-lit perspective.That those ancient people probably had a fire at the entrance—their form of security light and convenience that I would have embraced—indicates to me that humans were long destined to erase the stars, choosing ease and security over raw freedom.
So, I ask myself whether or not we humans, upon becoming civilized and soft with ease, were not inevitably headed from our beginning toward socialism and the nanny state.
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