On Viewing This Mudball

We are another breed here at Cape Kennedy – not everyone, but certainly the men who have finally gone up, and the handful most closely involved with them.  We’re trained to be cast closer to heaven and its planets.  And when you leave the earth for orbit in space, as I have three times, you can see how small our little mudball of a world is in true godly perspective.  When a one-and-a-half-million-pound thrust puts you up there, alone in the Mercury capsule, or with one other in the Gemini capsule, and you swing around the earth for several days, you come to have some spiritual knowledge of what the Maker meant when he packed our patty-cake together, and populated it with living beings, and gave this mudball a semblance of order and its men a modicum of intelligence.  Believe me, Mr. President, you lose all petty poisons that corrupt men and spoil life.  You lose all that in outer space.  You come to understand how lucky man is even to exist, how fortunate he is to survive, and you come to speculate on why he lacks appreciation of his lot, and why he destroys so much of his own pleasure and the enjoyment of those around him with incredible pettiness of mind and action.  One period, when I was up there, I thought – I know this will sound odd – but I thought, if only men like Caligula, Attila, Torquemada, Hitler, the jurors of Socrates, the witch burners of Salem, the bombers of Birmingham, the ravagers of reason and decency had been made to don our twenty-pound pressurized space suits and been hurtled into orbit, to look above and look below, and then had fired their retrorockets to descend to earth once more, they would come down like resurrected saints.  That’s what can happen, Mr. President.  No matter how many or few your failings, when you return from there to here, you are never the same again.  You’ve left prejudice, hatred, destructiveness, lying, cheating in the reaches of outer space.  You look upon your fellow men with the eyes of eternity, as your equals on the earth, and you want to live and let live.
—     Irving Wallace
Excerpt from his novel:   “The Man“
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On This Day In:
2022	I’m Just Sad (1,000,000 In U.S. Dead From COVID)
2021	I’ve Still Not Found #45’s One Thing
	Chewin’ On A Piece Of Grass
2020	Listening To A #IncompetentDonald COVID-19 Press Briefing
2019	I Am Doubtful
	Future Justice Looks Corporate
2018	True Measures
2017	Hoping For Tapes
	In It Now
2016	On Viewing This Mudball
2015	It Takes A Village
2014	In God’s Eyes
2013	We Root For Ourselves
2012	Like A Shark
2011	Discernible Virtue

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