Daydreaming

Scientists have begun exploring “Aha” moments, those flashes of insight typified by Archimedes’ purported insights acquired during long, leisurely baths. Most humans at least occasionally have such moments in which new insights about relationships, problems, or life suddenly surface in one’s consciousness.

Daydreaming, often considered a waste of time, represents about one third of a human’s waking moments. Brain studies report that daydreaming, contrary to popular opinion, is a time of intense mental activity when measured by EKGs and other modern techniques. Unlike analytical problem solving that engages the conscious mind, daydreaming employs brain processes not directly accessible to consciousness. (“A Wandering Mind Heads Toward Insight,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2009) Scientists now hypothesize a direct link between daydreaming and “Aha” moments.

Spiritual seekers and other pilgrims should find this research encouraging. Time spent in reflection, meditation, and being open to the Spirit may be among the most creative endeavors available to a human. Now I understand better why boredom, which I’ve long known to be vital for my own creative processes, is so important. The time I spend daydreaming frees brain processes to engage in thinking processes ignored or short-changed when one leads too hectic a life.

Explaining that one is hard at work daydreaming may not satisfy a demanding boss, teacher, or other person who claims some of our time. However, spending insufficient time daydreaming certainly shortchanges one’s self and probably diminishes one’s awareness of God.

Guns in church

Ken Pagano, the pastor of the New Bethel Church in Louisville, KY, has invited worshipers to attend services at his Assembly of God congregation armed. (Katherine Q. Seelye, “Pastor Invites Flock to Bring Their Guns to Church,” New York Times, June 27, 2009)

That invitation contradicts one of my fundamental beliefs about sacred space. Sacred space is a place of life and peace. The very concept of an armed congregation violates that principle. Worshipers attend armed not to show off their collection of weapons, not to hunt for food, but prepared to kill intruders who intend to do harm.

The U.S. armed forces have long recognized the inappropriateness of weapons in sacred spaces. Worshippers deposit their weapons, even symbolic swords, at the door before entering a Chapel. Obviously, the policy allows for exceptions when in harm’s way.

The prohibition against weapons in sacred spaces is ancient, dating back to the first Christians who believed that Jesus was the Prince of Peace and chose the way of the cross instead of the way of the sword. Modern violators of this ancient prohibition, such as Pastor Pagano, demonstrate either their ignorance or lack of respect for the Christian tradition, or both.

Some twenty states allow guns in sacred space. Clergy and lay leaders should strongly and unambiguously emphasize that bringing weapons into sacred space, a place of life and peace, is wrong and unacceptable.

Israeli settlements on the West Bank

Israeli settlements on the West Bank, as I have indicated before, constitute a major roadblock in moving toward a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. According to Isabel Kershner, reporting for the New York Times, “Almost 300,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, among a Palestinian population of some 2.5 million. Much of the world considers the 120 or so settlements a violation of international law.” (“Israel Hopes for U.S. Settlement Shift,” May 27, 2009)

Kershner also reports in the same article that Netanyahu’s government believes that it had reached various agreements with the last Bush administration, some formal and others tacit or informal, to support continued Israeli building within existing West Bank settlements. If correct, that represents the U.S. government acting in a two-faced manner, affirming the need for a two-state solution while supporting Israeli policies that greatly diminish the likelihood of achieving a two-state solution.

Peace will not come to the Middle East until the Palestinians, like the Israelis, have their own homeland.

Faith healing

Public Broadcasting’s “Religion & Ethics” recently featured a story about parents facing criminal action because the parents trusted prayer rather than medical science to heal their children. Faith groups, and sadly they tend to be Christian groups, that teach reliance on prayer rather than medicine teach a lie.

If we believe that God created, then God created minds. God gave humans the ability to help themselves, other living things, and potentially even the planet. Parents and religions leaders who fail to rely upon all God-given means to promote life insult God and injure the children entrusted to their care. Seeking proper medical assistance does not express a lack of faith in God.

The irresponsibility and destructive teachings and behaviors of religious leaders and parents who construct a sharp dichotomy between religion and science provide one example of the danger of believing in an omnipotent God. God, in creating, birthed a cosmos over which God lacks total control. That assessment, often thought heretical in previous generations, is the only possible explanation for God failing to intervene in the face of massive, egregious evil such as the Holocaust. That assessment of God's ability to act also explains, on a more personal level, why so many prayers for healing often seem to receive a negative answer, an answer incongruous with a loving and life-giving God.

We rightly consider people who fail to care for the children entrusted to them, or for other living things, criminal behavior. For example, the Wisconsin mother now on trial the death of her eleven year old daughter, a death the mother caused by preventing the girl from receiving treatment for diabetes, is at a minimum guilty of criminal negligence. The daughter’s diabetes was not the result of sin, as the mother claimed. (Robert Imrie, “Witness says Wis. mother thought illness was sin,” Washington Post, May 20, 2009)

In search of a deeper reality

We humans sometimes act as if our fragments of knowledge are absolutes. For example, ecologists routinely predict that global warming will cause sea levels to rise. Yet in Alaska, freed of billions of tons of weight by melting glaciers, the land has risen faster than the sea. (Cornelia Dean, “As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising,” New York Times, May 17, 2009)

Similarly, Stanley Fish has written two columns posted in the New York Times arguing that faith is unavoidable. (“God Talk - Stanley Fish Blog” and “God Talk, Part 2 - Stanley Fish Blog”) Positivism, the philosophical approach that demands absolute proof before accepting anything as a fact, leads only to dead ends. Fish contends that those who deny the necessity of faith, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, are wrong. The only way to prove the rationality of reason, Fish maintains, is to presume that rationality as an implicit element of one’s proof.

The fundamental epistemological question is not whether one has faith but in what one places his or her faith. Religion can obfuscate the search for truth with myth, superstition, and dogma that may once have proven helpful but now seem anachronistic. Alternatively, religion that points to a deeper reality, a reality not apprehended through normal sensory perceptions, can helpfully enrich life.

By way of analogy, art does not merely replicate what the sense normally experience. Art invites a person to experience reality in a fresh way, to see more than the eye had previously beheld, the ear to hear more than before, etc. The “truth” of art is the deeper reality to which it points.

The rituals, myths, and practices of religion invite one to transcend normal experience, to perceive a deeper “truth.” Religion leads one toward the reality that underlies and permeates the cosmos (we Christians call this reality “God”) and toward the ethical imperative of loving our neighbors as ourselves. Taken together, these dual “truths” infuse life with a meaning and direction otherwise lacking.

The non-religious willing to embark on a journey to that ultimate reality may depart full of skepticism. Even the long time believer frequently wonders if that reality does in fact exist, if the experience of the ultimate is more illusion or delusion than substance. Yet the journey leads to a beauty and love otherwise unknowable.

Market based healthcare reform

The CEO of grocery chain Safeway, Steven Burd, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece describes how Safeway has reduced the cost of providing healthcare insurance for its employees by linking employee contributions (premiums, co-pays) to employee behaviors. Safeway relies on four metrics: tobacco usage, obesity, high blood pressure, and cholesterol levels. Good test results reduce what an employee pays. Not surprisingly, the scheme has led to lower healthcare costs and better health for Safeway employees and their families – results difficult to contest. (Steven Burd, “How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2009)

Against that very positive indicator of what is possible in healthcare reform, healthcare insurance companies have increased the amount they are spending on lobbying by 41% compared to a year ago. (John Fritze, “Lobbying boosted as health care debate heats up,” USA Today, June 12, 2009) That increase bodes poorly for healthcare reform, an interpretation supported by the fact that Safeway self-insures its employees with respect to healthcare, i.e., no insurance company has a piece of the action.

Market solutions are integral to healthcare reform. But it is imperative that they be the right market based solutions. Safeway integrates a market based solution into its employee healthcare program by allowing each employee to choose his/her own behaviors, each with its own set of consequences. That is a very different market based solution than proposed by healthcare insurers.

One issue that Safeway has successfully managed is that an outside contractor receives employee medical test results, information unavailable to company management. A potentially more troubling problem is that people with bad genes, genes that strongly predispose the person to obesity or uncontrollable high blood pressure, may pay more for healthcare coverage in spite of the individual’s best possible efforts to practice good health. Nonetheless, Safeway anticipates a 40% savings in the cost of providing healthcare for its employees, a reduction that means its approach merit close consideration.

More thoughts on healthcare reform

The United States devotes approximately one-fifth of its economy to healthcare. Amazingly, participants in the public discourse on healthcare and how to improve it, from all perspectives, have found one fact about which they all agree: no other nation spends so much on healthcare while obtaining such poor results. Reform is obviously needed to improve global competitiveness, avoid bankrupting the federal government, and, most importantly, provide better healthcare to Americans.

The question that polarizes the healthcare public discourse is how to achieve that reform.

President Clinton attempted broad reform, aiming to achieve some form of a national healthcare system. That effort, led by Hillary Clinton, flopped badly.

President Bush opted for incremental changes (e.g., Medicare drug benefits) and avoided addressing the underlying issues.

Today, the situation is worse than ever. Approximately one hundred thousand Americans die each year from an infection they acquired while in a U.S. hospital. Another one and a half million Americans suffer harm from receiving the wrong medication. The U.S. ranks near the bottom on indices of health and healthcare quality such as obesity, heart disease, and infant mortality. The U.S. Institute of Medicine estimates that one-third of all medical procedures (X-rays, lab tests, etc.) are unnecessary, sometimes even injurious.

President Obama is engaging a broader cross-section of politicians in the initial stages of formulating reform proposals. Both incremental and broad-based measures are receiving attention. Both are needed.

The religious community should actively participate in this process, speaking on behalf of those whose voices are least likely to be heard, i.e., the poor, the immigrant, children – all of those whom Jesus’ contemporaries would have regarded as unclean or out of favor with God. Healthcare is valuable because it extends and improves the quality of life, not because of the rewards that it offers the medical professions, healthcare delivery systems, and profit-making enterprises.

At a minimum, healthcare reform must ensure that every person in the United States has full and equal access to healthcare. The right to life is the basic human right. Without a right to life, other rights are meaningless. The right to life presumes adequate healthcare.

Those without health insurance or adequate personal financial resources today receive inferior, insufficient, or no care. The news media sporadically feature stories about persons unable to pay for their care being shuffled from one hospital to another, as each hospital provides no more service than it legally must. Necessary treatments, including medicines, are beyond reach, the sick left with a prescription they cannot afford to fill. Yet still other people must choose between buying food, paying their rent, or purchasing their essential prescriptions.

Some research indicates that what a majority of Americans seeks is “guaranteed affordable choice.” Each of those three words expresses a different desire. Guaranteed means that everybody has fair access. Affordable means not only does everyone have access to healthcare but everyone can afford that healthcare without imposing undue financial burdens on them or family. Choice means that people want to select their own providers and to have a voice in selecting treatments.

From my perspective, choice is the least important of the three elements. For over eighty percent of my life, I have received healthcare from a national healthcare system that gave its beneficiaries no choice, the U.S. military healthcare system.

I believe that I received excellent healthcare. Sometimes my provider was a physician, sometimes a physician’s assistant, sometimes a nurse practitioner, sometimes an independent duty corpsman. Always, the provider had ample time and no quota of patients to treat that hour or that day. Medical personnel generally had sought to serve in military medicine because they found healing people rewarding.

In general, I had no choice about treatments. Too often, Americans want the latest procedure, regardless of cost and of any demonstrated curative benefit. Healthcare should be outcome driven: treatment protocols determined strictly by effectiveness.

The system proactively practiced preventive medicine, reducing the likelihood of problems going long untreated. Treatment was readily available almost everywhere. Perhaps the military healthcare system, which is certainly far from perfect and occasionally has received well-deserved attention for its shortcomings (most recently at Walter Reed), offers a model on which to base a form of national healthcare in the United States.

In addition to the military healthcare system, the U.S. has a second nationalized healthcare system in everything but name, Medicare. Unfortunately, Medicare is outrageously expensive (in 2006, over $8500 per beneficiary), user unfriendly, and grossly inefficient. Medicare rules and funding vary by state, complicating the system from the ground up. Some healthcare providers decline to participate, refusing to accept patients who wish to pay through Medicare. Complaints are legion.

Yet amazingly, nobody suggests the nation scrap Medicare. The elderly have sufficient political clout that providing guaranteed healthcare to most of them through this horrific and sometimes unaffordable system is overwhelming preferable to not offering Medicare. The rest of the population – equally human as the elderly – similarly deserve healthcare.

Need for healthcare reform

The need for healthcare reform becomes ever more obvious.

First, the economic downturn has, unsurprisingly, forced some family members to choose between caring for an ill family member and generating sufficient income to pay for housing, buy food, and cover other basic expenses. (John Leland, “Downturn Puts a Chokehold on Those Caring for Family Members,” New York Times, June 7, 2009) That choice is unfortunate for all of us, especially taxpayers and people who pay for private health insurance. Care provided by a family member tends to produce better outcomes for lower costs. When forced to rely on insurance benefits or publicly funded help (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), other premium payers or taxpayers bear increased costs that yield worse outcomes.

Second, research shows that doctors who spend more time with patients provide better care to those patients. This leads to healthier patients at less cost. (Julie Weed, “If All Doctors Had More Time to Listen,” New York Times, June 7, 2009) Many payers (Medicare, private health insurers) and providers (HMOs, physician practices) expect that a doctor will spend no more than ten minutes with most patients.

Quantity, not quality, has become one of the healthcare system’s key metrics. Quantity, unlike quality, is readily and objectively measurable. The best measures of quality healthcare are maintaining the maximum possible level of health while recovering as fully and quickly as possible from any disease, injury, or disability. A few components of that definition permit direct or indirect measurement, e.g., by comparing average times for a simple tibia break to heal one can approximate a norm, while recognizing that other factors, some known such as diabetes and others unknown, will cause individuals to heal at divergent rates.

From a policy perspective, unlimited healthcare is unaffordable for most people, regardless of whether the individual or the government funds that care. Thus, providing quality healthcare requires identifying those components of care that contribute the most to improved health. Allowing physicians to spend more time with patients clearly meets that test.

Applying market economics to healthcare reform in light of the above suggests that increasing the number of doctors should allow physicians to spend more time with each patient. Having more doctors might also lead doctors to compete with one another on the basis of quality and price. Competition could beneficially reduce physician incomes, reducing the number of persons enticed into the medical professions through the lure of six and seven figure incomes. Competition with informed consumers could accelerate a shift toward selecting treatment and practitioners based on outcomes rather than other criteria. Careful regulation could avoid undesirable competition’s consequences.

Perhaps the most egregious proof of the physician shortage is the immorally long hours that interns and residents must routinely work (often eighty or one hundred hours per week). Mandating those hours neither improves training nor the quality of patient care. Indeed, just the opposite happens: training and patient care both suffer.

The choke point for producing sufficient numbers of doctors is the limited number of slots in medical schools. Medical schools are expensive operations. However, lower salaries paid to medical school faculties, finding economies of scale, and seeking less expensive pedagogical modalities all offer options for cost reductions.

Conflict and risk

President Obama’s proposal to use dollars from the Project BioShield Special Reserve Fund to procure vaccine for the H1N1 flu virus (aka swine flu) has drawn criticism from the Fund’s bipartisan oversight board. The board alleges that this use of the fund will leave the U.S. less prepared to deal with a biological or chemical attack by terrorists. (Spencer S. Hsu, “Bipartisan WMD Panel Criticizes Obama Plan to Fund Swine Flu Vaccine,” Washington Post, June 8, 2009)

That predictable criticism points to two truths about political life in the United States. First, every government fund, organization, regulation, etc., has its own lobby. If such a lobby did not exist, the fund, organization, regulation, etc., is highly unlikely to exist. People who want to avoid or to minimize conflict will not enjoy the U.S. political process with its inherently adversarial approach to everything. That observation is especially pertinent for many religious people who seek to live with equanimity and contentment.

The pervasiveness of conflict in American political life helpfully reminds me of the biological reality that life itself inherently entails conflict as organisms vie with one another and their environment for survival. Believing that life can be tranquil is to live with a dangerous illusion. Humans do well to seek interior equanimity while recognizing pervasive exterior conflict.

By extension, life in community, even religious community, inescapably involves conflict, a truth too many members of religious organizations prefer to deny or to ignore. Consequently, many religious organizations, including most Christian churches, deal with conflict in unhealthy, destructive ways, e.g., pretending that it does not exist or insisting on premature or superficial resolutions rather than addressing the actual issues. Healthy organizations view conflict as growth opportunities, seeking to identify areas of substantive disagreement, potential solutions (including agreeing to disagree), and slowly moving forward – all within a context of openness and mutual respect.

Second, the U.S. lacks the resources (financial and other) to fully prepare for every possible contingency. The Project BioShield Special Reserve Fund’s oversight Board is correct: using the funds will leave the U.S. less prepared to deal with a possible terrorist attack using biological or chemical weapons. President Obama is also correct: using the funds will address a major health risk that Americans currently face. The tactical choice of which alternative represents the wisest move depends upon expert analysis about the likelihood of terrorist attack employing chemical or biological weapons, the probability of a swine flu pandemic, the number of deaths either might cause, etc. The government can only spend those funds once, an axiomatic truth relevant to individuals and all organizations. Life requires difficult choices because life is unavoidably risky.

What risks are reasonable to take in the pursuit of happiness? Intentional answers to that question may not ensure less risk, or even better risk management, but can lay the foundation for greater happiness by laying a foundation for accepting one’s fate and eliminating unproductive blame games.

Global economic trends

Global economic shifts merit some reflection. China now owns a quarter of the U.S. debt. U.S. consumers shop in markets dominated by Chinese manufactures, continuing the process by which China is buying the U.S. When in stores, I sometimes check the country of manufacture for various products. Invariably, I find few “Made in the U.S.” labels, some East Asian and Central American labels, and a preponderance of “Made in China” labels.

As China and India develop economically, they both dramatically increase global pollution and energy consumption. Both nations have prioritized economic development ahead of pollution abatement. This results in rapid economic growth at a dual cost to the rest of the world. First, the pollution that has made some Chinese and Indian cities nearly uninhabitable invariably affects the rest of the world as air and ocean currents carry contaminants beyond national borders. Second, those nations partially sustain their lower cost of production by ignoring the substantial costs of producing and living in environmentally responsible ways. (Of course, the U.S. and European nations were for years, and remain in many ways, guilty of some of the same irresponsible environmental practices.)

Meanwhile, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) benefits from our global addiction to oil, an addiction nowhere stronger than in the U.S. The huge inflow of cash to Arab OPEC members predominantly goes to unjust and oppressive regimes. The largest inflow, to Saudi Arabia, indirectly funds radical Islamicist terrorism as the Saudis continue to fund exporting their radical brand of Islam, Wahhabism, around the world.

Concurrently, the U.S. during its housing boom had a net negative savings rate. The recession has reversed that trend, creating a low, positive savings rate. However, that trend will probably end once confidence in an economic recovery becomes widespread.

What do these trends signify?

Perhaps the trends signal that even as the twentieth century was the American century so the twenty-first century will be the Chinese century. If China successfully moves its huge population into the modern era, shifting from subsistence agriculture to a consumer economy, China is likely to become the world’s economic powerhouse. Chinese culture might allow this shift without a concurrent insistence on democracy and western style freedoms. Alternatively, economic prosperity might bring increased democracy and freedom without violent revolution. Either scenario points to a new superpower on the block.

Signs of emerging Chinese dominance are found not only in the marketplace but also in their development of overseas naval bases to protect the global movement of their products. U.S. maritime strategists interpret the growing Chinese naval prowess as a direct threat to the U.S., e.g., various articles in recent issues of the Naval War College Review. I disagree. The Chinese have a long history of not invading other nations, except those located along Chinese borders. The latter nations (Tibet, Mongolia, etc.) provide a barrier against external threats. The frequently xenophobic Chinese have historically preferred international economic to politico-military dominance, confident of their inherent superiority. The veneer of Communist rhetoric seems unlikely to have changed that fundamental view.

Conversely, if new technology replaces reliance on oil then flow of funds to OPEC ends. Any new technology(ies) must cost less than oil does to succeed, with a relatively short payback period for upfront investment costs. This will destabilize oppressive Arab regimes and substantially end Saudi export of Wahhabism.

Additionally, new, cost-effective energy technologies will provide the U.S. with exports on which it can compete with China and India while balancing or reversing the outflows of cash to those nations. Cost-effective energy technologies will appeal to China and India because the technology would facilitate continued economic growth at a lower cost with reduced pollution.

Predicting new technology timelines is notoriously difficult. No assurance exists that a new energy technology will emerge or that the U.S. will birth that technology.

What is clear is that economic shifts toward China, India, and OPEC have substantial consequences for many aspects of life, consequences that too few people contemplate. Those who do contemplate those consequences unfortunately tend to focus on a narrow agenda, such as U.S. maritime strategists.

Living in the moment is insufficient to produce sustained happiness. Instead, one must balance the present and the future – something that too few Americans do, individually or collectively.

Living for real, not vicariously

Why do masses of people seem to need celebrities? If Unilever did not believe that millions would buy a particular shampoo because of Catherine Zeta-Jones hyping it, Unilever would not pay Zeta-Jones millions for a brief commercial. If millions of people were not willing to pay to attend sporting events, or to sit through seemingly endless commercials to watch those sporting events on TV, sports teams would not pay their best players millions, sometimes tens or even hundreds of millions, of dollars.

Part of the answer is that many persons do not deeply like themselves, their life, or both. Shampoo is for cleaning the hair. Most shampoos perform that function tolerably well. In truth, I have a difficult time determining whether one shampoo cleans better than another does. I can tell shampoos apart by their scent (no help in cleansing from the smell), whether it includes a conditioner, and by the packaging. Admittedly, some people may be able to discriminate between shampoos more effectively than I do. Yet sex appeal does not figure into that process.

Clean is good. Sex appeal is culturally determined, promoted through advertising, and regarded as a means by which corporations generate income – none of which has anything to do with cleaning one’s hair. If I like myself, I like my hair (what remains) and do not need to conform to anyone else’s concept of beauty. Nor can the shampoo one uses revolutionize one’s life. Choice of shampoo cannot even really alter one’s life. A partner may find a lingering scent more pleasant than another scent. A more expensive shampoo will leave one with marginally less money than an inexpensive shampoo. Advertisers use celebrities to infuse a product with the cachet of a certain self-image and lifestyle, hoping to convince potential consumers that the consumer will look better or have a better life through using their product.

The real path to liking one’s self and one’s life is not found by attempting to emulate most celebrities. I can be no other person in this moment than the person I now am. I can have no other life in this moment than the life that I have. Accepting those truths is the first step toward liking one’s self and one’s life. An inward journey leads me to discover myself and the ultimate reality that fully embraces that self. An outward journey leads me to toward becoming the person that my inward journey has shown me.

Part of the answer why people like celebrities is that living in a fictional world – the world of another person – is often easier than living in one’s own life. Watching sports is easier than participating in athletic activity. Viewing art is easier than creating art. Being a spectator spares one the difficult work of living into one’s own self more fully. Being a spectator is akin to reading a novel – one inhabits another’s world, albeit for only a short time, escaping one’s own world.

Time is precious. Even the longest-lived person has a finite number of days, not to be wasted but invested with as much meaning as possible. Life is our one real possession. Above a certain level (subsistence and a little more), people with money are no happier than people without money. One’s attitude toward self and life, how one uses his/her time – these are the real determinants of a happy, fulfilled life. Celebrities have nothing to do with that equation.

Part of the answer why so many people like celebrities is that celebrities can infuse us with hope. For example, if Barack Obama, raised in a broken home, can become President of the United States, then so can I. People draw similar lessons from other celebrities in business, media, politics, sports, etc. To the extent that a celebrity becomes a beacon of hope for others, celebrity status contributes to the well-being of others.

Part of the answer why so many people like celebrities is that celebrities can also point the way for others. Aristotle did this. Buddha did this. Jesus did this. The Prophet Mohammed did this. Sadly, many celebrities lead lives that point in self-destructive, hateful directions. The unending reportage of celebrity involvement with drugs, abuse of others, criminal behavior, unhealthy relationships, and self-centered consumption all reveal a person who does not like him or herself, his or her life, in spite of being accounted a celebrity in the eyes of the world. Similarly, many people worthy of celebrity status – parents, teachers, clergy, and others who by their openness, honest caring, and selflessness give life to others – live largely unnoticed, unsung heroic lives.

In other words, genuine personhood – not fame or fortune – is the true measure of success in life. We should look for hope and for lessons about life to them. They are the cosmos’ true celebrities.