David CookView other columns by David Cook
What is becoming more and more stunning to me about Monday's total eclipse is not what will happen in the sky but rather on the ground.
Millions of us, all together.
Looking up.
The moment will be a civic miracle underneath an astronomical one. I cannot think of a time this has happened or will again: so many Americans, in an almost ancient, primal way, gazing upward at the heavens and skies, away from ourselves, at something transcendent and mystifying.
It will be different than Super Bowl Sunday, with its rampant commercialism. Different than Election Day, with its lesser-of-two-evils frustration. Different even than Thanksgiving and Christmas morning, with their, well, rampant commercialism.
The Great American Eclipse is elemental in ways those are not - just the sun, moon, us.
Maybe within that moment - as this burning star 1.3 million times bigger than our Earth is overwhelmed in afternoon darkness - some of us can find what has seems so elusive in America.
Smallness.
Humility.
And awe.
Monday's upward gaze could be national medicine, a momentary tonic of sorts. Such hubris and anger circulates through our culture. Life in America feels so large these days. So top-heavy. So disproportionate in a bloated, about-to-burst way. Charlottesville. North Korea. This ever-reckless president.
So often, our gaze is at ourselves: we stare downward at our own dramas, our tiny worlds, our many stresses. Or we gaze at others, often with contempt, fear and confusion.
Or we gaze down at all the buzzy conveniences of modern life - our phones, for example - that make us feel so in control, such masters of this world.
How mighty we like to feel.
How small we really are.
But to gaze upward? To do is inherently nonviolent. The object of attention becomes not us, but something otherworldly and inexplicable. To stare at the heavens is an act of restoration: it puts us back in our rightful place.
We are not kings of this world. Our mastery is a false one: Standing before this gorgeous, mysterious Earth, we ought to feel achingly grateful and humble, yet so much of our lords-of-capitalism culture runs roughshod over plain, stream and prairie.
To gaze upward is to be reminded of the beauty and largeness of this world.
To gaze upward is to be reminded of mystery.
To gaze upward is to be reminded of perspective that would lessen so many of our troubles.
"If you could have a bird's-eye perspective on the Earth and could look down at all the conflicts that are happening, all you'd see are two sides of a story where both sides think they're right," wrote Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. "So the solutions have to come from a change of heart, from softening what is rigid in our hearts and minds."
The eclipse seems to have that softening power. Coming just days after Charlottesville, it counter-messages white supremacy, with all its narrowness and hardening. It's hard to be monstrous toward another human yet humble before the natural world.
That's why Charlottesville was so ugly. It trampled on what should be cherished: human dignity. We live on a breathtakingly diverse planet - not enough words could be written to describe it - yet Nazism wants to throw barbarian fists and batons over skin color? And belief?
(I wish the eclipse came with a soundtrack, with the sun and moon shouting down at us: "Just who do you think you are?")
I do not know how America will organize itself against this resurgence of white supremacy, but doing so must consist of more than antifascist militancy. Tactics are tactics, but vision is vision: the former drives the train, but the latter sustains. There is something bloody exhilarating about street-fighting neo-Nazis. Something brave, too. But that will win nothing in the long-term. Real victory is found in conversion.
And conversion is always a matter of the heart.
And the human heart is always the problem and solution.
"There is nothing new under the sun," the book of Ecclesiastes declares.
Most of us don't want our country like this.
We must change the way we see things.
We must alter our gaze.
David Cook writes a Sunday column and can be reached at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCookTFP.