COVID – Page 2 – Humanist Blog

Eric Michaels: Becoming

[This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, and this World AIDS Day it seems fitting to remember an Australian pioneer who lived and died near the first official World AIDS Day in 1988, towards the start of the epidemic. His life and battle and death have lessons for our COVID world today.]

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“If one is going to go to all the trouble to be gay, one ought to do a more interesting and useful job of it. Models exist in our very recent past. They should be recalled.” – Eric Michaels, 1990b, 192.

These were the last words documented in Australia’s earliest public AIDS diary. Possibly penned in 1982, and later added to his diary from 1987 and 1988 before being posthumously published in 1990, the words of Eric Michaels speak to us from the days of a terrible epidemic – one that was perceived to target people who were disempowered, stigmatised, invisible, and/or socially undesirable. At a time of terrible stigma, discrimination and open homophobia, Michaels encouraged the gay community to find role models and create its own pride amidst the prejudice. In doing so, he became one of those role models.

Stigma and invisibility continue today, in that the AIDS epidemic remains largely overlooked and forgotten. On a personal level, my introduction to Michaels’ book was when I first sought out a copy in a prominent public library; upon my request, the book was duly collected from the stacks and delivered to me – missing its colourful cover, which appeared to have been removed with surgical precision along the edge of its spine. When I asked the librarian what happened to the book, he carelessly shrugged. I later purchased another copy of the book online and donated it to the same public library, so that Eric Michaels’ words would be available to the public in the exact condition that he would have wanted.

It seemed fitting to help memorialise a man who foreshadowed many admirable outcomes from those terrible times.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography reports that Eric Michaels was born in 1948 to Jewish parents in Philadelphia, USA, and became a hippie studying cultural anthropology, examining groups as disparate as Christian fundamentalists in Texas, USA, and the Yanomami people of Brazil. He arrived in Australia in 1982 and ultimately became a lecturer at Griffith University in Brisbane, dying with AIDS in 1988. (Cunningham, 2012)

A tragic coincidence of timing meant that he arrived in Australia at approximately the same time as another US import: a particular strain of HIV and AIDS. Michaels thereby became somewhat of a potential double outcast: disapproved in mainstream Australia because he was gay, and also socially isolated from some sections within the Australian gay community because he was American in the days when the origin of AIDS was attributed to gay Americans (and well might we learn from his experience today, during another pandemic, when some people seek to scapegoat others from another country where COVID is meant to have originated – as though its geographic origin has anything significant to do with its treatment or mitigation). Paul Foss notes that ‘Eric’s sense of personal loss and betrayal’ – at his rejection at least as much as his actual AIDS mortality – contributed to an ‘accusatory tone’ as well as ‘vemom and impish humour’ in his writing (Foss, 1990, 13). In harnessing and harvesting this anger, Michaels foreshadows the rise of ACT-UP, an activist group borne of self-empowerment and anger.

For Eric Michaels, it is likely that this ‘otherness’ may have contributed to his writing/publishing his AIDS diary in the days before any Australian gay man had the interest or opportunity to do so. Those early days saw women such as Suzi Lovegrove take that same opportunity to bypass the dominant homophobic prejudice against the epidemic in Australia and create autobiographical documentation, such as the film, Suzi’s Story, or varied biographies. Michaels’ diary was the earliest such effort from a gay man to break out of what he termed the ‘lavender prison’ of homophobia (Michaels 1990b, 191).

It also seems probable that this ‘otherness’ similarly motivated Eric Michaels to spend much of his professional life assisting similarly disempowered voices. His academic career in Australia had revolved around, ’empowering Aborigines through the appropriation of new technology’ (Cunningham, 2012) and he had asserted that, ‘a cultural future can only result from political resistance’ (Michaels, 1987, 78). And yet he was also very conscious of the ‘politics of speech’ in empowering the very voices he wished to highlight (O’Regan, 1990; see also Michaels 1994).

Such empowerment foreshadowed the empowerment of indigenous and other voices during the AIDS epidemic; from gay men to women and others who fought for their lives as well as their civil rights. Their battle resonates a generation later, after male homosexuality has been decriminalised and destigmatised, in no small part due to these foot soldiers.

Michael’s situation and perspective seem to echo those of his contemporary, Scottish journalist and New Zealand resident Tom Maclean, whose own AIDS pathography, If I Should Die: Living With AIDS, reflects the life and times of his trans-Tasman gay compatriot. Whereas Michaels implicitly evokes a firm resolution to choose life and activism, McLean more pointedly speaks about this stark choice among the last words in his own book, which was published four days before his death in 1989 at age 40 (PA, 1989). “There’s a lesson in everything if you look for it,” McLean writes, “Even in AIDS” (McLean, 1989, 98).

His friend John Hobson eulogised Michaels with recollections of their life and times together, but spoke frankly about his last photograph:

“The last image of Eric shows the ravages of Kaposi’s Sarcoma; a rare form of skin cancer prevalent in the early years of the epidemic. It is almost unheard of these days thanks to advances in treatments. It is definitely a shocking image, but one that Eric chose to be published as his final one. As well as a clinical photo to evidence his ultimate reality, it was also clearly one last opportunity for him to poke his tongue out at the world.” Hobson, n.d (b).

Hobson also notes that after his death, Eric Michaels’ Warlpiri and Kardiya friends from Yuendumu created an AIDS Quilt memorial panel in his memory. (Hobson, n.d.(b).)

The title of his diary, Unbecoming, is a play on words: tapping into the societal disapproval of gay men as being somewhat unbecoming, it also implicitly examines his own unravelling life due to AIDS and questions whether he is, in some inverse act of creation, literally un-becoming himself. Ultimately, he demonstrates that in his becoming less or other than himself, he is also becoming much more – perhaps the perfect symbolism for an activist seeking to create something positive out of loss. A generation later, as the world seeks to rebuild or redefine itself after the ravages of another pandemic, we might learn valuable lessons from this experience.

Although written during the era of AIDS, Michaels’ words resonate during our era of COVID:

“Maybe the lunatic right wing will mobilise and we will have to drag ourselves out of this languor to protect ourselves and respond. Or maybe the baby boom will eventually reach their sixties and, upon looking back, develop a more powerful criticism than any advanced so far.” (Michaels, 1990b, 192).

Maybe.

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

References:

Stuart Cunningham, ‘Michaels, Eric Philip (1948–1988)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2012, accessed online 14 November 2021.

Paul Foss, 1990. ‘Foreword’ in Eric Michaels, 1990b.

John Hobson, n.d (a). Queers of the Desert: AIDS Quilts (1990).

John Hobson, n.d (b). Queers of the Desert: Eric Michaels.

Eric Michaels, 1987. For A Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu, Melbourne: Artspace.

Eric Michaels, 1990a. ‘A model of teleported texts (with reference to Aboriginal television)’, in Tom O’Regan (ed.), 1990, Communication and Tradition: Essays after Eric Michaels, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2.

Eric Michaels, 1990b. Unbecoming: An AIDS Diary, Rose Bay: EMPress.

Eric Michaels, 1994.’Aboriginal Content: Who’s Got It, Who Needs It?’, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 21 – 48.

Tom McLean, 1989. If I Should Die: Living With AIDS, Glenfield: Benton Ross Publishers.

Tom O’Regan (ed.), 1990. ‘Preface‘, Communication and Tradition: Essays after Eric Michaels, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 3, No. 2.

PA, 1989. ‘Author dies of A.I.D.S.’, The Christchurch Press, 27 March.

Time and Friendship

To coincide with International Youth Day (12 August), I recall a young friend who I never met – but whose story changed my life, and who might teach us of the potential within us all.

“Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.”
― Tennessee Williams, Memoirs

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

The date 8 August 1988 might be one of vague mathematical curiosity (8-8-88) and yet it is etched into my mind as the day of a news report in which a young Sydney man lost his life; his story appearing in The Sun, a newspaper that is now also long gone.

He was reportedly infected with HIV in the days before modern multi-drug therapies made HIV a long-term medical condition instead of an almost-certain death sentence.

His last request was to return home from hospital, and his friends eagerly organised a party for his return.

This was an era when HIV was greatly feared and stigmatised, in no small part due to its popular conflation with newly-decriminalised male homosexuality and imagined contagion through normal social contact. Accordingly, his ambulance attendants wore ‘space suits’ as they delivered him home on a stretcher. His friends fled when they saw this and realised that he had AIDS.

Doctor Julian Gold told the newspaper that the young man, ‘died literally of a broken heart 48 hours later in my hospital’.

I was myself a young man when I read this story, and yet 33 years later, I remember being deeply touched by this tale of abandonment by mates and friends. We all recall the flush of youth and our eagerness to find special friends and share time and companionship with those who share our youthful enthusiasm for living and loving and learning together. This is part of the natural process of maturation, moving beyond close family, in search of our own more individualised, extended family. In his desire to find significance and belonging among his own friends – and in their failure to meet his expectations – this young man’s story touches something primal in us all.

(Wherever they are today, I hope that his friends have learnt from their past mistake – we are all only human, after all – and have gone on to redress their error of having been less than their best when the going got tough).

We might also learn from the yearning for companionship within his story – our common human condition means that we share a bond with others, regardless of their age, gender, culture, sexuality, or any other marker that has traditionally been used to separate and divide us. We share the ability to hope and dream; to yearn for significance and betterment; for living and laughing and crying. Like all sentient beings, we share the potential for suffering or flourishing, for intimacy or loneliness.

Whether they may be runaway or refugee, indigenous or ill, disempowered or discrimated against – our sentience surely compels us to empathise with others in need, and go out of our way to support them whenever we can. Indeed, I suspect that the fullest test of our humanity, ethics and compassion is whether or not we help those with whom we might ordinarily feel that we share the least in common, except for our common humanity.

I am reminded of a Biblical injunction to sacrifically offer help to others: “Greater love hath no man than he who gives his life for his friends…” and I see this saying immortalised on war memorials, building plaques, tomb stones, and used ubiquitously across common literature. However, I see deficiencies in this quote; after all, even serial killers and dictators care about their friends; and its wording suggests an elitism by implying that only friends are worth protecting rather than all humanity. I would respectfully amend and supercede this Biblical quote, emphasising its secular humanist ideal and removing it from any religious context, by expanding it to include everyone instead of just an insulated bubble of our nearest and dearest: Greater love hath no person than they who give their life to help another; turning strangers and enemies and their whole human family into friends.

Thirty-three years ago, that anonymous young man’s story convinced me that awareness of the suffering of others is our choice. His story inspired me towards activism. How many others are like him today, around the world, suffering in silence during modern-day plagues: HIV, COVID, disease, poverty, starvation, injustice, war, violence, discrimination, or the indifference of others? And what are we doing about it?

However we answer those questions reveals more about our own humanity than it does about those whose suffering we are challenged to confront.

Source:

Dan McDonnell, 1988. ‘A tragic test of friendship’, in The Sun, Melbourne, 8 August.

(*My study of HIV/AIDS has been connected to a PhD study. This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.)

Something Has Happened

Forty years ago today, a worldwide epidemic was unknowingly announced in a newspaper. Unlike COVID in 2020, this other virus had been unforeseen and undiscovered and, ultimately, politically stigmatised until it was on track to cause irreparable loss of life.
A generation later, it still has no vaccine.

His name is not recorded in Australia’s history books. He was just an average Australian bloke, but he became possibly the first casualty – the proverbial Unknown Soldier – in one of Australia’s most frightening wars.

He was born in Australia in 1909, when our nation had barely reached Federation. He spent his infancy during harsh drought, in an era of horse and cart, electric trams and the telegraph.

As a young boy, he would have seen older lads – possibly his father and older brothers – go off to the Great War. Later, he would have witnessed those who survived the war returning home to live with possible shell shock or disfigurement – and to face the worldwide pandemic named Spanish Influenza.

National Museum of Australia http://collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/object/216331

As a young adult, he saw the opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge, survived the polio era, lived through the Great Depression and he may have served in World War Two.

As an older adult, he saw many changes and challenges: television and antibiotics, automobiles and aircraft. He witnessed the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile Crisis, the Apollo Moon landings, US assassinations and civil rights demonstrations.

His world was shaped by the Cold War and his lifestyle may have been oppressed by McCarthyism. He lived through the early days of Gay Liberation and he may have marched in the original street protest which led to the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Like many Australians of his generation, he had never travelled far nor done anything particularly significant or notorious. Tragically, the end of his life would be most significant.

Around February 1981, he began to get sick – at the same time when millions of Australians were becoming distracted by the engagement of Prince Charles to Lady Diana. By the time of the Royal wedding in July, our friend’s prolonged illness had developed into a persistent cough and he had pronounced difficulty with breathing.

The illness which struck him was testimony to the international travel that had become a ubiquitous aspect of our modern jet-setting lifestyle, despite the fact that he had personally never travelled overseas. He was afflicted with what was then called Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia (PCP), a fungal pneumonia that had first been identified in 1909 (Grmek, 1990, 116) – ironically the year of his own birth. It was only after World War Two that PCP began to appear in malnourished children who lived in overcrowded orphanages of post-War Europe – and a link was established between PCP and humans whose immune systems had been damaged or compromised (Shilts, 1987, 34.) A symbolic link had also been established between PCP and the concept of war or deprivation – a metaphor which would not be forgotten in the coming years, including in Australia.

All this background probably meant little to our friend, who battled his chronic breathing problem without being aware that others around the world had also recently puzzled their doctors with similar or related medical difficulties: people such as 47 year-old Grethe Rask, a female Danish surgeon who died in December 1977 (Shilts, 1987, 6 & 7); two pediatric siblings in San Francisco who were diagnosed in 1978 and 1979 (Cochrane, 2004, 28) while gay men in Los Angeles were being diagnosed with strange diseases around 1979 (Black, 1986, 20 – 21); an unnamed gay 27 year-old African-American hospital guard in New York City who died in December 1979 (Hooper, 1999, 57); a young gay man named Nick in New York’s Fire Island, who became sick in March 1980 (Black, 1986, 18 – 19); an anonymous gay 36 year-old dairy industry agricultural engineer who died in Denmark’s Rigslhospitalet, Copenhagen, in September 1980 (Shilts, 1987, 34 & 35); a Portuguese taxi driver and two women in Paris who all succumbed in late 1980 (ibid, 36 & 37). Ominously, a number of young gay men in Los Angeles had also been identified as getting sick and/or dying from the same ailment in 1981 (CDC, 1981) while nine gay men in San Francisco were also diagnosed in July of that same year (Cochrane, 2004, ch. 3). These people were merely the tip of a metaphoric iceberg.

In Africa, the danger had already been spreading silently for years. Swiss author Henning Mankell reports anecdotal evidence that mysterious ailments were being noticed among people in Uganda as far back as the 1970s. According to one story, a young man named Lukas had become afflicted in 1974 with an increasingly-debilitating mystery illness which included swollen glands, weight loss and an outbreak of sores. Lukas, and his two wives, all got sick and died – followed, in subsequent years, by other people in Kampala. One of Lukas’ workmates had explained this mystery to his child through a simple but hauntingly significant truth: “Something has happened” (Mankell, 2004, 52 & 53).

Something was indeed happening – and a killer virus was silently spreading; its first likely identified victim in the USA being an African-American teenage boy who was retrospectively diagnosed some decades after his death in 1969, at around the time that the rest of the world was being distracted by the scientific and social watersheds of Apollo 11 and the Stonewall riots.

But the silent killer continued to build its strength, and gay activist Cleve Jones recalls:

“I have memories from 1978 and 1979 of friends of mine contracting diseases that I’d never heard of, or that I’d heard of but only in the context of impoverished countries. I remember a friend came down with meningitis, and that seemed to me to be odd. There was also quite a bit of hepatitis going around. So here was sort of a glimmering realization, but nobody took it too seriously, because the sexually transmitted diseases were easily treated with just a few doses of antibiotics.”

Our anonymous Aussie battler would most likely have been totally oblivious to this community of suffering when he was admitted to a Sydney hospital in August 1981, after six months of progressive deterioration. He died the following month, aged 72.

Twelve years later, doctors tested a preserved medical specimen that had been collected from the patient in January 1980. Using a test which had been unavailable and unimaginable back in 1980, they discovered that the patient had died of a condition which we now call AIDS. Yet when this patient died, AIDS had barely even been recognised as a problem overseas; it was still so new and mysterious that it had not yet been accurately identified nor assigned its name; and its existence in Australia had been unknown at that time. This led Australian doctors to make a worrying declaration in 1994 following their retrospective diagnosis of this patient:

“Whether this represents an isolated case in a man who progressed rapidly because of his relatively advanced age, or whether HIV was present earlier in Australia than previously thought, remains unanswered” (Gerrard et. al., 1994).

“Patient X” had never had a blood transfusion nor any record of injecting drug use – and yet his blood told a chilling story. Somehow, he had been exposed to the virus here in Australia in late 1979 or possibly earlier (Carter, 1994; Davies, 1993).

A new pandemic had arrived in Australia and silently claimed its first casualty.

Then, forty years ago today, the looming larger catastrophe was announced to the world. The New York Times – not the first to publish an article, but the first to publish one that gained widespread public attention – announced that a “rare cancer” had been found in 41 homosexuals (Altman, 1981). It revealed the worrying aspects of an emerging pattern: rare diseases were being caught as an indication of a compromised immune system among young gay men who should not normally be victims to such medical oddities (McKie, 1986, 21 & 22).

One of the people who read that newspaper report was John Foster, an Australian historian who was on study leave in New York City. He later recalled the day which would forever announce the public arrival of slow-creeping catastrophe into the lives of millions of people around the world:

“On Friday 3 July 1981 I went early to Mass. By the end of the Mass the priest was sweating. Summertime in New York, I was discovering, was drenched in sweat, though it was rarely so pure an essence as the kind that impregnated the wafer I received from the priest’s damp hand. On the subway, sweat sickly mingled with cheap scent; in the gay bars on Christopher Street it hit you in a mixture of amyl or diffused in the acrid drift of marijuana smoke; on the streets it came at you out of peripatetic hot-dog stands or the open doors of greasy-spoon cafes.

“Walking home from church, with my shirt already wet on my back, I bought a copy of the Times and turned in at Nick the Greek’s for my usual eggs and coffee. On the eve of a holiday weekend it was less than normally busy. There was room at a corner table to spread out the paper, a small but significant luxury which disposed me cheerfully to the day ahead. There was no news of any moment, which may explain why I spent so long reading the almost full-page advertisement of the Independence Savings Bank. ‘Sing out on the Fourth!’ it said, and to encourage this holiday spirit it printed the music and three verses of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’…

“So much glory is hard to take at breakfast, and so the Times, which is a newspaper of impeccable taste, balanced this rich fare with a thin column of more astringent medical reporting. Doctors in California and New York had diagnosed among homosexual men forty-one cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. The cancer appeared in violet-coloured spots which might be taken for bruises and which often turned brown before they spread throughout the body…

“It seemed to have something to do with promiscuous sex. Most of the cases had involved homosexual men who had had multiple and frequent sexual encounters each night up to four times a week…

“This was definitely not serious. Or at least, it did not concern me. I was not in the violet-spot league.” (Foster, 1993, 39 & 40).

Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Three weeks later, on 25 July 1981, John Foster was to meet another man – and this meeting would change both their lives. On 14th Street, by the Steps of Our Lady of Guadaloupe’s chapel, he met young Juan Gualberto Cèspedes (ibid, 41) and they struck up a casual friendship which quickly became a long-term relationship. Since his arrival in New York as a refugee some twelve years earlier – just in time to experience the culturally inspirational effect of watching the Apollo 11 Moon landing – Juan had subsequently been unable to realise his personal ambition of becoming a dancer due to the prejudice of others and following an unfortunate encounter with a New York taxi cab. His relationship with the Australian academic John Foster would provide him with new hopes – and it would provide John Foster with companionship and confidence.

Foster’s mistaken belief that he and Juan were not in any danger of belonging to the “violet-spot league” was a continuation of the same confidence which had been experienced by a younger Juan Cèspedes in the days of Gay Lib – and yet they were later to discover that such confidence and dreams would ultimately turn into ashes.

A new epidemic had been silently creeping into our world for some time, creating a concurrent epidemic of discrimination, stigma and disempowerment, and thereby giving rise to great ongoing needs for activism both in Australia and overseas. Ebola, SARS and COVID were not the first major epidemics in living memory, but our response to these others has been shaped – rightly or wrongly – by the lessons we have learnt (or failed to learn) from HIV/AIDS.

References:

Altman, Lawrence, 1981. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals”, in The New York Times, 3 July, A20.

Carter, Helen, 1994. “HIV Dates From ‘70s – Doctors,” in The Herald Sun, 7 March, 9.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1981. “Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles,” in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR ), 5 June, 30(21), 1-3.

Cochrane, Michelle, 2004. When AIDS Began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic, Routledge.

Davies, Julie-Anne, 1993. “Australia’s First AIDS Death in 1981: Doctors,” in The Sunday Age, 7 November, 1.

Foster, John, 1993. Take Me To Paris, Johnny, Minerva.

Gerrard , John, et. al., 1994. “Australia’s First Case of AIDS?” in The Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 160, 7 March, 247 – 250.

Grmek, Mirko D., 1990. History of AIDS, Princeton University Press.

Hooper, Edward, 1999. The River, Allen Lane/Penguin Press.

Mankell, Henning, (translator Laurie Thompson), 2004. I Die, But the Memory Lives On: The World AIDS Crisis and the Memory Book Project, Harvill Press (Random House).

McKie, R., 1986. Panic: The Story of AIDS, Thorsens Publishing Group, UK.

“Pneumocystic Pneumonia – Los Angeles”, in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control, 5 June 1981, 30(21); 1-3.

Shilts, Randy, And The Band Played On, Penguin Books.

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Happy #AtheistDay!

For World Atheist Day, 23 March 2021

Welcome to a day that celebrates NOT having a belief. One Internet source claims:

Atheist Day was originally about a fictional case of an Atheist who had decided to sue the government. The reason for the fictional lawsuit was a simple one—unlike all the major religions, there was no day for Atheists, to which the judge said that April 1st (i.e. April Fool’s Day) was their holiday. While this case was just a hoax, the story spread quickly and was actually accepted as fact.

The Atheist Republic website explains that the circular symbol (above) stands for a null set (as in zero belief in god) and a fertile wholeness of completion that results. In a city that recently celebrated ‘donut days’ (days when our COVID cases dropped to zero – or a donut) perhaps we should celebrate Atheist Day as Cosmic Donut Day, giving it an almost Australian vernacular.

The Atheist Republic also explains:

A central component of Atheist Day is raising awareness of the discrimination and stigma faced by atheists around the world. Atheists are your loved ones, your friends, your doctors, your social workers, your teachers, your police officers and in short, the people in your life who are hiding in plain sight.

Having a day to celebrate and commemorate a lack of belief might seem to be somewhat frivolous or vexatious. After all, we do not (yet) have a day to celebrate those who disbelieve in Santa Claus or aliens with anal probes. And yet the right to celebrate atheism is as fundamental as any other right to freedom of thought, belief or religion.

To me, atheism represents non-conformity with tradition and faith; it demonstrates a willingness to be different and to think divergently. It resists tradition and dogma for their own sake, and potentially offers an open-minded approach to diversity of race, sexuality, gender and gender identity. Atheism and agnosticism and freethought and secular humanism demonstrate a wish to think critically and autonomously, and hopefully exemplify a keenness for seeking evidence via science and rationality. Free from the shackles of anthropocentric religions, atheism inspires the courage to admit that our human existence is pretty insignificant within a cosmos that is wondrously awe-inspiring, but vaster and stranger than we can possibly imagine:

“There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria. There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.“- Carl Sagan, Planetary Exploration (University of Oregon Books, Eugene, Oregon, 1970), page 15

Agnostic astronomer Heather Couper acknowledges that there is plenty of discovery still to be made in our human quest for knowledge:

“Have we discovered our Galaxy yet?” And I think the answer to this question is “No, not quite”. There is plenty of work ahead for the next generation of astronomers.”

Amidst this immensity, it is up to each of us to find or create meaning in our own lives.

Part of our answer is surely celebrating the very human essence that lies at the center of our existence – and beyond that, the moral and intellectual biocentric imperative to uphold other sentient life. Perhaps Carl Sagan expressed it best:

“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

Happy Atheist Day – may you enjoy whatever meaning you create for yourself.