Starry, Starry Night II

  --Made in China,
Pavel Constantin (Romania)

Mad? Is it mad that you destroy other people
to save yourselves? You have done this.
Is it mad that one country must destroy another
to save themselves? You have also done this. 
--Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)
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[APOLOGIES to RangerAgainstWar readers for our recent absence. We will be back posting next week. ~editrix.]

Subtitle: A Generation Lost in Space.

In all United States battles since 1965, we ground-pounding, boot-wearing and  gun-toting soldiers have hugged the earth, dug in and fought and possibly died in the mud, ooze and frozen landscapes of foreign lands from Afghanistan to Vietnam. While we do this, spacecraft have delivered men to and returned them from the moon. At the same moment, our civilization reached for the stars while sending my generation to fight in the primordial ooze.

The Apollo 13 astronauts were feted upon their return as conquering argonauts while at the same moment, soldiers were fighting and bleeding out in the mud. Mankind celebrated space flight as that small step for man and reveled in exultation at the ennobling of mankind, while other men were carrying out a more primitive and destructive task, one not celebrated with joy.

Through our space program we sought to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as though enervated by our trials with life here on earth. What would we bring to the hoped-for new life forms? Would we reveal the destructive actions of the other, earth-bound men who had been sent to fight their own kind?

If we cannot co-exist here on our planet, why would we care if there are other life forms? Would we not just risk encountering and introducing more dissension, spreading our own unease elsewhere?

If we cannot communicate with the Taliban (or even our own neighbors), why imagine we would do better with other life forms? Until we have decoded inner space, outer space will be a token acquisition.

As an older man, Ranger is fascinated by the sky, but as a young soldier he never spent an ounce of energy trying to understand anything beyond the depth of his fighting position or the range of his weapons. So which viewpoint is important? Do we look beyond ourselves, or continue to dig hasty fighting positions into the earth? Should not the earth nurture us rather than enabling our violence?

Man seems intellectually and morally too immature to reach beyond his horizon. Never-ending war seems his lot.

(dedicated to Dave.)