Mother Nature insists on getting our attention. On April 5, the northeastern United States had its first notable earthquake since the nineteenth century. She shall again try to distract us from our cell phones, televisions, and various text messaging devices on April 8, 2024. An eclipse of the sun is scheduled on that day. Some will undoubtedly see it as a harbinger of trouble ahead. Many will claim it is a manifestation of obscure prophecies spoken long ago. Unlike much of what is observed and reported by our modern news outlets, no amount of editorializing or denial can convince us that it did not happen or that it was part of a conspiracy to undermine our national security.
What passes for news in the twenty-first century is what was routinely considered propaganda years ago. Tucker Carlson, given his recent unhinged praise for the totalitarian Russian system and its homicidal dictator, will probably note that the sun was not blacked out in Russia. Putin abhors the darkness in which he cannot find and poison his enemies. Marjorie Taylor Greene will probably blame the eclipse on Democrats in the House of Representatives, and the Governor of Texas will blame the opponents of “secure borders” for the 4 minute blackout that allowed the entire population of Latin America to relocate to Dallas.
This may sound nonsensical, but it differs little from the absurd claims and counterclaims being made in our body politic and in broadcasts that insist they are sources of legitimate news. Labels are thrown about, not to authentically describe people, but merely to garner attention from an increasingly desensitized public. Men convicted of obstructing the peaceful transfer of Presidential power for the first time in our country’s history are praised for their ruthlessness and called “hostages” by a former President. The migrants fleeing the chaos to our south and providing an enormous boon to the labor pool in the United States are deemed “animals,” “rapists,” “home invaders,” etc., rather than just the latest wave of desperate people that started in 1620 when a small group of religious nonconformists squatted on the lands of the Wampanoag native Americans and stole their grave goods. These pilgrims were, of course, not illegal immigrants. They were armed invaders, intent upon displacing the indigenous people and taking over lands the native Americans had held for thousands of years. It would take several generations of their descendants to set up “legal” barriers to immigration that would exclude people like themselves.
National politics has never been very sensible. We have had members of the Executive branch shooting it out in New Jersey. We have had members of the Congress literally beating each other’s brains in on the floor of the House. Supreme Court jurists have refused to recuse themselves in cases where they have obvious financial conflicts of interest, and the Constitution has been so twisted and re-interpreted over the years that the simplest sentence can no longer be trusted to convey the meaning basic grammar dictates.
Indeed, it is a mad, mad world, but at least we can rely on Mother Nature to ignore our foolishness and abide by the laws of physics. We can debate why New York City had a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, but there is no debating it occurred. Perhaps it was because a fault line in New Jersey was restless or because the part of the continent that was covered by glaciers tens of thousands of years ago is still rebounding from the burden of those long absent ice sheets. Perhaps it was demons in the deep, battling it out to determine who would get to flood the coastal United States as global warming ramps up.
News of the impending eclipse, unlike that of the earthquake, has been upbeat. Eclipse viewing glasses, real and fake, have been selling out. Planes designated as eclipse chasers have been fully booked, although how those aircraft will track a phenomenon moving at over 1,000 miles per hour remains unexplained. Hotels, motels, and parking lots along the path of “totality” are already full with people waiting for their 4 minutes, 28 seconds of darkness.
Our devoted news media have saturated the airways with warnings to those devoid of commonsense that they should not look at the sun without protective lenses or other such devices. Most uninformative have been the networks that promise to carry the eclipse “live.” You do not need to go outside or look to the sky for those 4 minutes, 28 seconds. You can see it all on your television or cellphone, a new low in spectator sports. The obvious question with any event lasting more than four minutes is, “Will there be a commercial break in the middle of the telecast?” Will the moon’s transit in front of the sun be brought to you by PreserVision? Will there be a news banner at the bottom of the screen telling you that you are watching the actual eclipse, not just an AI [artificial intelligence] representation of the phenomenon? We shall see.
The earthquake and the eclipse are helpful reminders of our place in the cosmos. We are, after all, just passengers, indeed, just spectators, on the third rock from the sun who have been given an opportunity to observe forces and phenomena that should leave us awestruck. They should also remind us that, like it or not, we are all in this together.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
