The astronauts and cosmonauts who saw and see our planet Earth
from orbit or the Moon were deeply moved by the image of how small
our world looked against the immense blackness of the Universe. They
also noted how from their vantage points that geopolitical borders
and human strife were essentially invisible (and no, you can't see
the Great Wall of China from the Moon and barely even in LEO).

And you know a lot of space travelers were and are on the
conservative side of the spectrum, many of them coming from
military backgrounds.

By the way, it is coming up on the 40th anniversary of humanity's
first manned mission to the Moon, where the Apollo 8 crew took
that famous set of photographs of our planet from about 240,000
miles away:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/09/18/1416934.aspx

For an even grander (or smaller) perspective, it is going on 20 years
(yikes!) since the Voyager 1 probe took a snapshot of our Pale Blue Dot
from the edge of the Solar System.

Here is what Carl Sagan had to say on that image, along with the
image itself:

http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/pale_blue_dot.html

And watching Powers of Ten is another good mind expander:

http://csaweb.yonsei.ac.kr/~rhee/1998/cosmos/power10.html

I hope you don't get too much flack about being an "unpatriotic traitor"
from those on the right who know you who become aware of your
new awareness, REB. Especially those who don't know or care about
the perspectives laid out above.

There were these guys once who said that we weren't the focus of
all existence and that we circled some big ball of luminous gas that
wasn't even the most important or brightest object in the Universe.
They too got a lot of flack for this "radical" concept (and sometimes
worse), but in the end, guess what....