America needs to find a new way of thinking.

Billy Collins:    Well America has to lead the way.  I mean America has to make the biggest steps, I think.  And again, it’s a matter of getting to some kind of bipartisan understanding that there are . . . that global warming, for example, is not a Democratic or Republican issue.  And it’s not just an American, or French, or an Australian problem.  It’s a global problem.  So it’s a challenge that’s asking America and everyone to think in a different way, which is not to sound like America’s oldest hippie, but to think of us as earthlings, as people on this globe. 

Richard ______ is offering trips into outer space; but I think if we could send a lot of people into outer space, we could look back at this “little spot of earth”, as Chaucer called it; I don’t think anyone has had that view and has been unchanged by it.  So maybe we will take so many years that we will . . . so many people will be able to look at the globe from outer space and see that we were actually living on this little marvel.