Joseph Sabino Mistick: Looking to the heavens, together

It took a major astronomical event, but we learned last week during the solar eclipse that Americans are still capable of standing together. Tens of millions watched the eclipse from Arizona and New Mexico to Maine and New Hampshire.

Many folks here watched a partial eclipse from home. Some of us traveled into the totality zone to get the full effect. Whites and Blacks, young and old, Democrats and Republicans — all gathered together and looked up, beyond our world.

On one tiny beach on Lake Erie, fancy picnickers watched the total eclipse alongside a young man who stared at the sun through his welder’s helmet.

For a while, we were all the same.

Most news reports described a celebratory mood as people waited for the moon to pass directly between the Earth and the sun. Parents took off work and took the kids out of school for this rarest of celestial events. And people went silent for the few moments that it took for the total eclipse to come and go.

In my neighborhood, as it got darker, the birds started their evening chatter in mid-afternoon. It must have seemed awfully early for them to be ending their day, but they came back a few hours later and did it again. The backyard owl never paused, hooting for hours until actual nightfall.

As reported in The Guardian, some eclipse watchers revived ancient fears about the cosmos. At one gathering, someone in the crowd said, “Ninety minutes till the end of the world.” His neighbor responded, “Well, I can think of worse ways to spend it.”

We have experienced national unity before, in times of war, but this eclipse was something different. Something bigger than us brought us together this time. For a few minutes, we all looked away from Earth, away from our differences, away from the mess that we have made of some things.

Sharon Grigsby wrote in the Dallas Morning News, “It was a moment of reset, an opportunity to realize the things we are stressed out about and quarreling over mean nothing to a universe that’s so beyond our understanding.” We can’t be sure that we can hold onto that feeling.

Our lawmakers are dug-in and so evenly divided that they cannot govern or even support the things that would benefit everyone. Some of our fellow citizens have lost their love for freedom, praising foreign tyrants and wishing the same for America.

There are brutal wars, starving children and desperate families pounding on our door, begging for us to protect them. But collectively, our institutions are stuck — unable or unwilling to do anything.

In his 1994 book “Pale Blue Dot,” astronomer Carl Sagan describes a photograph of Earth taken from billions of miles away by the Voyager I spacecraft.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

The solidarity that so many of us briefly experienced last week is a wonderful gift. We were compelled to understand that we are part of something vastly larger than ourselves.