The Big Guns Of The U.S.

Today, the fathers of these lands, the conquers of this country fired a big missile at one of the archaic floating beer cans we've so diligently polluted the cosmos with. The reasoning being that said beer can might fall from the sky and damage somebody's yard, or something to that effect. The only solution this man's government could come up with was to fire several megatons of scrap heaven-bound. And if good Christian prayers were answered and a team of mathematicians locked in a basement were able to get their arithmetic correct, a big kaboom should ensue.

This is not some script with Bruce Willis on the wish-list, nor is it a bad way to spend two hours watching TNT. This is news people. The real dilly. Those that take your taxes and rape your daughters are shooting mindlessly into the sky like a scene out of Oklahoma!

I'm not sure what committee put their stamp of approval on this, but it's not their loyalties I'm interested in. It's ours. We let this happen. We knew our leaders were corrupt, knew they were plenty capable and hideously inept enough to buy into a stunt like this. And still,
we let them do it. The biggest force in this land, bigger than any army or police force, the common citizen, sat back and let the man shoot bombs into space.

And I can deal with the notion that this may have been unavoidable. Had this country sat in a big circle and sung "Kumbaya" for days end, The Big Cheese and his merry moles would've probably shot off the damn thing anyways. So, I can deal with a lack of protests, fury and fear, and the second coming of the revolution.

What concerns me is that few questioned this. They watched that weapon fly and didn't stop to wonder, "What in god's name are we doing this for anyways?"

Did it occur to anyone that launching flying dynamite into orbit might be a bad idea? That the possibility of missing might be more problematic than anything that could've possibly fallen down on it's own? Or how about considering how every other civilized country on this land (and probably some of the primitive ones) might take to look at us like a bunch of drunk cowboys? I know people realize that we've pretty much pissed our chums over at the UN off in the past few years. Our American rebellious streak as finally started to get old, and all the other continents are started to ask, "So, when are you gonna grow up and take some responsibility?" Our response was to shoot a gigantic tool of destruction at a moving target just to see if we could hit it. Mature. Real mature.

I think we all need to look at this as a defining moment. A moment where people can all agree our government clearly isn't considering who it governs. If this military hip-shot was truly because bad toxic goo sitting in this thing had a small chance of landing on someone, then why wasn't this resolved before? is our military and our space program truly that ignorant of what it's satellites are doing? Have our G-men truly succumbed to the roll of the parents of a teenager? They can wiretap my phone but stay oblivious to the nesting patterns of a satellite?

Most likely, there were other reasons. Reasons we weren't trusted to know. Dark secrets or bruised egos, maybe a combo of both. Who knows? Not me, and probably not you.

But we do know this: We've been let down. Those who would claim to lead us honorably and with wisdom have acted the fool. Run amok with our moneys to build bigger booms which were used in the futile pursuits of the wily and macho. We've seen it all with our own eyes.

What we do with this information remains to be seen. But in the darkest parts of my grit and frustration, I do hope that it's got you considering who governs you. I, on the other hand, am hiding my brown ass in the basement.