Last night I made an observation that helped me put things back in their true perspective. Looking up into the southwestern sky, I can see our big, bright, neighborhood giant, Jupiter. With only the aid of a 45x spotting scope I can clearly see several bright points around the large sphere. Those bright points are four of Jupiter’s moons. These four, the Galilean moons, are: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. These can be seen through a good set of binoculars, if you can hold steady enough.

Looking up and seeing these and knowing that these are the same four bright points observed by Galileo and others helps to remind me that this whole world is both tiny and yet long enduring, at least on man’s time scale. When I get too wound up about the latest plans of the local oligarchy to construct a great and wonderful downtown, whether we like it or not, it helps to step back, look up and think about the big picture. These annoyances about process in a supposedly free and open government will pass and we will likely eventually accept the completed trails, stadiums, carefully crafted developments and the like, even though they may be nothing like what “we” would have liked.

Do we really know or care about the volcanic activity on Io? Does Ganymede know or care that there are political conventions or stadium trusts on Earth? No, I think to both questions. So I remind myself to relax and remember the Golden Rule, “those with the gold make the rules.” Little has changed on the blue planet for thousands of years. Technology advances, but man is pretty much the same.