It’s a space odyssey where we live
By: Arnold Bornstein
If somebody asks where you live, and it’s in the Monroe Township-Jamesburg-Cranbury area, and you’re asked where it’s near, there’s some pride in saying it’s near Princeton and Princeton University. I note that because Dr. Brad Hansen, an astronomer at Princeton, is the team theorist for a research team that has reportedly reaffirmed that the universe "is at least 13 billion years old."
The astronomers were reported as using "cooling cinders of burned-out stars as a kind of cosmic clock" to determine the age of our universe. Another Princeton resident, who used to live on Mercer Street and whose name was Albert Einstein, devoted a lot of his time to thinking about all that seemingly endless space out there, and its relationship to the way humans measure time on this planet called earth.
Of course, 13 billion years is a long time by anybody’s standards, but I’m also fascinated by space, and not necessarily just the universe’s space. A recent trip to Providence, Rhode Island, a very typical part of what we call New England, reminded me once again of the diversity and history of our nation and our country being only one part of the globe in which various spaces are given boundaries and names as nations.
Like Princeton, Providence is home to another Ivy League school, Brown University, and while the food in restaurants and speech accents and climate may be slightly different in Rhode Island and New Jersey, the dominant fact is that basically, people are people. Whether it’s differences in New England states, or the South or Southwest or Far West, the dominant fact is that basically, space is space.
Right here in our own hometowns and neighborhoods, space is a factor. People who lived here a few decades ago remember the sprawling woods and farmlands and when there were many more trees than people. Deer and small animals were everywhere. Now we also have sprawl, but some planners call it "urban sprawl."
At one time, Monroe Township’s master plan had set a limit for four adult communities. Now it looks like that amount may more than double in the future. Warehouses are mushrooming throughout the area and trucks are clogging main arteries that had previously had a hard enough time accommodating two-way car traffic. Residential developments also are booming, and they say that a new high school will be needed soon.
That’s the way it is, and one would hope that the providing of municipal services and the expected taxation and the needs of residents can all be meshed together in an orderly and functional fashion, but too often things don’t work out like they looked on the drawing boards. That’s also the way it is.
I grew up in a part of New York City, in a section that seemed like a small town, so you wouldn’t mistake me for a country boy, but I still like to daydream about open space, especially when I travel through some of our major cities in this country, as well as cities overseas. For every landmark-filled or affluent area, there are also areas teeming with people and that have been battered by years of decay and neglect.
During World War II, in 1944, Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters recorded a mammoth hit song, Cole Porter’s "Don’t Fence Me In." Its lyrics include:
"Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
"Don’t fence me in.
"Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
"Don’t fence me in."
The song topped the charts for eight consecutive weeks, and obviously it hit a chord with America during the war years, that even today isn’t just nostalgia.
Space isn’t only about land. Among other things, it also involves emotions, as when a husband and wife or a boyfriend and girlfriend separate briefly or go their own way for a while "because we need our own space."
It also involves the games we play, as in the cliché that "it’s a game of inches." Sometimes a little space or inches can decide winning or losing, in determining whether a basketball goes through a hoop, or a first down is gained in football, or a baseball goes for a hit or an out. In war, a little space is sometimes the difference between living and dying.
So much of the world’s turmoil appears to involve space, be it between the Palestinians and Israelis, the slums of cities, populations exploding within non-expanding space, environmentalists and industrialists clashing over land use, lands that can not or do not yield enough food for under-fed and under-nourished people, and endangered creatures running out of places to live.
In the days of the Roman Empire, it was said that "all roads lead to Rome." Nowadays, like it or not, Perrineville Road in Monroe Township and Railroad Avenue in Jamesburg and Main Street in Cranbury are linked by humanity to all the roads of the so-called global village, be it a major thoroughfare in one of Europe’s capital cities, or an alleyway in China or a dirt road in Afghanistan or Africa.
For the space that once separated countries and people has been rendered insignificant by modern science and technology, and an incident along one road could trigger events in other parts of the world. While all roads no longer lead to Rome, we do not know where all our roads will lead to in the future.
Since we love our children and grandchildren, the world’s leaders should be thinking about the unthinkable: a nuclear holocaust that could perhaps reduce the earth to smoldering cinders like other burned-out stars, or perhaps to just another empty space in the universe where this planet had once been.