From a member of the Revolution Club, Chicago

Eclipse

August 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

I felt like a child inside. I was at awe. The eclipse was beautiful, exciting and amazing! Although I didn’t get to see the totality because of a cloud covering it during the exact time, to experience the area go from extremely sunny and hot to cool and dark was incredible and breath-taking. I expected extreme darkness but it was a beautiful, soft, dim sundown kind of darkness. During this time, I could understand why people in the old days sought to the Gods for answers. I imagine a farmer planting seeds during a hot, sunny afternoon when all of a sudden it’s dark. I imagine them saying, “what the fuck?” So many things people couldn’t explain in the old days, especially when it affected their crops, their livelihood. But with science, it has been possible for us to understand how the world works.

One of the many crimes of this system is to keep millions of people in ignorance by denying them the knowledge of science, and not being able to apply the scientific method and approach to understanding the world. If it weren’t for this capitalist system based on commodity relations, especially now with Trump/Pence science-deniers, science would be available to everyone and scientists would have more freedom to explore the vastness of the world.

But under this oppressive system, people like myself, even beyond childhood, I didn’t even know that the sun and moon were two separate entities, although it didn’t make sense to me. I was scared of science because it was hard to understand. I don’t remember learning anything in Chemistry class in high school. I was lost and couldn’t follow the lecture. And this is exactly the goal of this system, to keep masses ignorant. Without the scientific method and approach, people believe this is just the way things are. NO!

In the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian, science is “...aimed at continually increasing the storehouse of scientific knowledge, and broadly fostering the scientific spirit and method, for the benefit of humanity... Beyond that, encouraging curiosity about the natural world, in its manifold dimensions, including human society and its historical development, and fostering and applying creative and at the same time rigorous scientific means for exploring and learning about all this, is fundamental to the full flowering of human beings and to their ability to contribute to the advance to a communist world.” Part of this is for scientific discoveries and breakthroughs to be shared with scientists around the world. And unlike making science available to a small few under this system, under the New Socialist Republic “ ...efforts shall also be made not only to provide students and the people more broadly, through the educational system and in other ways, basic scientific knowledge and grounding in scientific principles and the scientific method, but also to involve growing numbers of people in scientific research and experimentation—including in projects where they are working together with and are led by full-time scientific professionals—and to draw on the vast experience and accumulated knowledge of the people in society as a valuable resource for scientific endeavor.”

Under this new system, science will be available to everyone, and it will not scare people away. Remember the terrible twos? Well, this stage, the terrible twos should be a lifetime of curiosity, excitement and awe.

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