Wasteland of the Free

WHY BOTHER?

FASCISM

WAR

RACISM

MYTHS

LETTERS

BLOGred

HYPOCRISY

COVERUPS

ENVIRONMENT

SPORTS

IS GEORGE BUSH A PSYCHOPATHIC SADIST?

CONSEQUENCES OF ATOMIC WAR

Reasons for Optimism, or Rays of Hope

• It is fundamentally American to love your country and be critical of it at the same time, although we are reminded occasionally by 'love it or leave it' styles of right-wing attitudes that not everyone thinks Americans should enjoy all the freedoms we have today. It is a constant struggle to remain free and sometimes battles are lost, but the good news is that we have a pretty long heritage of freedom even if we don't always pay much attention to it on a day-to-day basis, and over time civilization does seem to be improving in the long run. There seem to have been a lot of bumps in the road lately though, so we are paying more attention to keeping our civil and human rights intact in the face of threats to them and incursions upon them from our own government. One wonders, just how bad do things have to get for people to take to the streets? Active measures from propaganda to national guard scenarios can and sometimes do act to prevent and ameliorate civil resistance, so that restraining influence will naturally tend to raise the threshold for how bad things will have to get before people will take Thomas Jefferson's advice and modify their government. At some point I hold fast to the hope that the people subjugated will ultimately rise up and do something, and that meaningful change can happen nonviolently (better Gandhi's approach than violence or civil war).

• There are other solutions to the Saddam problem besides the United States launching an immoral preemptive war and using weapons of mass destruction to show that it is wrong to develop weapons of mass destruction. Sojourners has a good solution for neutralizing Saddam Hussein and his warmaking abilities without killing a lot of innocent people. [NOTE 7/16/03: their proposed solution was not implemented and is not there any longer, but Sojouners is still a very good site to visit at any time].

• Our space program is the best thing we have going for us, I think it is what will be most favorably remembered about us a thousand years from now, as the time when we first escaped the bounds of earth to venture forth upon infinity. (They will puzzle over the boundless stupidity of all the reactor waste we generated, though). Even though it could stand a lot of improvement, NASA is still the best game in town for pinning our hopes on becoming a spacefaring culture and getting into space permanently. That is why I think George Bush Junior's memorial speech to the Columbia crew was the one good thing he has actually accomplished with his stolen Presidency so far, because he guaranteed that our nation's space program will go on. That is just about the best thing that he could have promised us, I pray that he meant the space program would get more funding and maybe overhauled. (Update 3.18.05: no sign of that yet, looks like it was only another case of Bush's rhetoric not matching his true intentions).

  There is no reason we could not have routine access to space in five years with about the same level of difficulty as is involved in flying to Antarctica. In both cases almost all supplies are carried aboard and extreme protection from the environment is required. The technology to build a high performance jet aircraft is essentially the same technology that is required to build reusable spacecraft, so we have plenty of infrastructure that only needs to be made better use of. Of course we also need a restructuring of national priorities from war to space development first and most of all. If George Bush Junior could be persuaded to shift his gaze from the right toward the center, toward the activity that could best guarantee a steadily bright future for America and the world rather than the bright illumination of detonating nuclear bombs.