Apogee

This evening the moon, our only naturally orbiting body, will be at apogee. This marks the point in its orbit where our moon is farthest from Earth. If you compare the moon in the sky at apogee to its appearance at perigee (when it is closest) this coming October, you'll see that it is 13 percent smaller tonight. Of course, this is only a function of perspective.

Tonight the full moon is as far away as its orbit allows.

It seems to me that my own country is at apogee—that perhaps our world as a whole is. We are as far away from ourselves as we can possibly be, without simply slipping out of our orbit and wandering into eternal oblivion. Sound melodramatic? Probably. OK.

Yet one needs not look very far to find evidence of this: Wars rage across the globe, and I challenge you to name even one which can trace its origins to anything other than immorality and illegality, on one side or both; a sixth mass extinction is ramping up full tilt, and Homo sapiens are driving it; economic interests outweigh every other concern on any sociological or political level you can name; global warming threatens to tip our planetary ecosystem into disaster, and still some of us refute the facts without understanding them; the government of these United States (who, for better or worse, happen to be top dog on the global scale—for the time being) is so mired in corruption, self-interest, scandal, and immorality that nothing good seems able to come from it. Even though it has the greatest potential for good.

I'm talking about that kind of apogee. I'm talking about that kind of distance. I'm talking about a very elliptical orbit and we find ourselves on the out-swing.

And then I look at the moon and I remember perspective. Parallax. That sort of thing.

And I hope I'm wrong.