This good state of Iowa nestles itself comfortably in the middle of these United States of America, as its 29th incorporated state, covering 56,273 square miles or 1.5 percent of the country’s total surface area. The nation itself occupies 3,796,742 square miles, or 1.58 percent of our entire planet Earth’s total surface area.

This same planet Earth, indolently spinning like a top around its axis at 1,040 miles per hour, lazily revolving about the sun once every 365 days — at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour — comfortably nestles its own self in the warm embrace of our solar system, which is a mere 5.6 billion or so miles wide. This solar system, by the by, orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at a cool 492,126 miles per hour.

It is easy to get lost in the minutiae of these minor calculations, however, and so we had better get to the real hardtack before long. Our galaxy — this very Milky Way — moves at a velocity something near 373 miles per second, and is, by modest estimation, 100,000 light-years wide and in possession of 100 billion planets — to say nothing of its hundreds of billions of stars (the oldest of which are nearly as old as the universe itself).

This galaxy, meanwhile, comfortably snuggles itself in the midst of something called the Virgo Supercluster, which contains roughly 100 other galaxies apart from our own. The Virgo Supercluster, incidentally, is one of about 10 million superclusters known to the observable universe. It should be mentioned, however, that it was recently discovered to be but a lobe of a greater supercluster, which is centered about something ominously so-called the Great Attractor.

This Great Attractor — but a subpart of the greater Laniakea Supercluster — wraps its celestial arms around a trifling 100,000 or so other galaxies, stretched out over maybe 520 million light-years. But as aforementioned, the Laniakea Supercluster that encompasses it is yet one of 10 million others that each call our massive, ever-expanding universe home.

But enough of these trivialities. How about some real fourth-quarter zingers?

The state of Iowa is 171 years old — exactly 70 years the younger to these United States of America. The continent of North America, meanwhile, is generally believed to have been settled by Siberian migrants some 12,000 or so years ago — meaning that our nation has existed for roughly 2 percent of the land’s settled history.

Civilization, as we know it, has been around for perhaps 10,000 or so years. The homo sapiens species of today — evolved from our 6 million year old ancestors — is itself an estimated 200,000 years old, meaning that we’ve been farming and governing and warring for just the last 5 percent of our known existence.

Life, by the by, has been around for an estimated 3.8 billion years. It took about 2 billion of these years to produce a single multi-celled organism, however, and it was not until the last 40 million years or so that an animal more than a few centimeters long made an appearance. Our species, then, being a meager 200 millenniums old, has been stumbling and skipping and jumping and running about our planet’s surface for just the last one-half of 1 percent of the time that has elapsed since that first miniature shag-rug biota survived its first animalian second of life.

But now to bring things back around:

If my analysis has shown anything, it has shown the nature of our own inarguable self-importance. The nature of our own planet’s self-importance. The nature of our own species’ self-importance, the nature of our own country’s self-importance and the nature of our own people’s self-importance — our own people’s, that is; not those dirty others.

Those dirty others — those immigrant folk — are an unknown quantity. They are not like us. They are different from us. They are not as trustworthy as us. They are to be feared. They are to be avoided. They are to be kept at a healthy distance. They are to be thought the worse of, labelled, categorized, stigmatized, stereotyped, alienated, slurred, belittled and oppressed. They are not to be let into our country. Such is only fitting. We must move toward seclusion. This is the way forward. 

And so, in short, this is why I wholeheartedly support the president’s immigration ban. I support anyway in which we might isolate ourselves from our brothers and our sisters. We’re better off on our own. We simply aren’t in this together.

We wouldn’t want any of those disagreeable immigrants fouling our bit of the universe.