Vandals of humanity's progress
Three years into writing every day about something, I don’t yet feel like a writer, but I have become familiar with the rhythms of the craft.
Ideas come when they come.
Sometimes the proverbial pen is heavy, and other times, it is light.
When I write it is my goal to help people see what they can’t quite distinguish, with a piece of the puzzle that may help it all fit together.
What I believe in more than anything else is the idea of the United States of America. No matter how much I would love to know the ending of the story I know that I will not live to see it because America exists beyond the lifespan of any one person.
My children’s grandchildren will be Americans, and so will theirs. They will know little of me or my life, or anything that happened on X this week. Just like my children relate to their ancestors they won’t particularly be troubled by the lack of connection, but that does not mean they are not.
We all are.
Senator Mark Kelly is an American astronaut and US senator recently threatened by an obnoxious horde of deranged miscreants and sycophants, who serve at the pleasure of America’s first fascist criminal president. It was a good thing in this wretched moment for the American people, and particularly America’s young men, to see an exceptional leader stand resolute for principles that must be defended.
Kelly sits in John McCain’s US senate seat. He is measuring up.
Today, NASA is being run into the ground by a “The Real World” reality show monkey named Sean Duffy, who wants the American people to dress better to fly economy. Even worse, the American space program has become the tawdry playground of billionaire elites who do not understand that space is not something to be owned, controlled or governed — especially by them.
Consideration should be given in this moment of American crisis to all of the dangers bearing down at once, but not at the expense of losing focus on the details of what is happening and why.
There are seven MAGA officials who have become the key architects of the unfolding catastrophe that will climax in a spasm of misery, penury, death, and war. They are Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller. Below them are more dangerous people and addled sycophants, but these individuals are the core villains.
They are sick, twisted, deranged, corrupt, and in the end, evil.
Evil.
It is a difficult concept.
American society does judgement very well, but it doesn’t seem to know where to aim.
Let’s step back and look up before we examine the dirt of MAGA and consider American greatness.
Consider this explanation of human history and progress laid out against the challenge to explore the next frontier:
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this nation’s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century.
Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them.
Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter.
Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels.
Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available.
Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers.
Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
These words belonged to the 35th president of the United States of America John F. Kennedy, delivered at Rice University in September 1962. Sixty-three years after his address, his beautiful granddaughter, whom he never met, wrote a beautiful essay about a tragic announcement.
Within it, she mentioned the eldest son of her grandfather’s murdered brother, one of the greatest inspirations in American life over the last 60 years, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Here is just a snippet of what she had to say about RFK Jr.:
As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly half a billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. Early in my illness, when I had the postpartum hemorrhage, I was given a dose of misoprostol to help stop the bleeding. This drug is part of medication abortion, which, at Bobby’s urging, is currently “under review” by the Food and Drug Administration. I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve.
RFK Jr. is evil. His derangements are already killing children. How many will die in the end?
Whatever the answer may be, Louisiana Senator Dr. Bill Cassidy will always be the man who made it happen.
President Kennedy continued:
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait.
But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them.
This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.
The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.
We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it.
For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.
We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the vows of this nation can only be fulfilled if we in this nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first.
In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.”
There is a great wisdom contained within Kennedy’s address that can be perfectly applied to the advent of the age of artificial intelligence and the moral infants of Silicon Valley designing the technology. It is not up to them to decide how their inventions will be used. As Kennedy says, it is up to us:
For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.
Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.
I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
Today, there are more than 7,000 satellites in Earth orbit, which connect all of the Earth together. Everything that John Kennedy talked about happened.
He was right.
He was right about this also:
Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it? He said,
“Because it is there.”
Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.
And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
John Kennedy did not live to see his vision fulfilled, but billions of human beings watched this moment that his dream created.
It was brought to life by more than 400,000 Americans in every state of every race and creed who made it happen. It was an achievement fueled by American genius, ingenuity, determination, daring and courage.
John Kennedy did not land on the moon, but he took all of humanity there. John Kennedy led humanity into space with peace as his aim. Now, his nephew Robert, an angel of death, an American Mengele, serves a cause that seeks to destroy the achievements in science and momentum of human progress that his family did so much to create.
RFK Jr. has sold out his family, his country, and humanity for American fascism and the Trump family. He has yoked his rottenness to theirs, and has disgraced his magnificent name. He has sullied it for all time, while pulling humanity back from the heavens and onto the darkness of disease, hopelessness and death.
Before 1946 there had never been a photograph of the Earth. What it looked like was a function of imagination. Here is the first image ever taken from space:
It comes from a captured NAZI V-2 rocket fired from White Sands, New Mexico.
Twenty-two years later the most famous photograph in human history was taken on Christmas Eve of 1968 by Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 as the space craft rounded the moon. It is called EARTHRISE:
Think about the proximity of 1968 to today and consider the immense privilege it is to be alive in this age of “miracle and wonder.”
No human beings had ever seen what our beautiful planet looked like before these photos.
Fifty-seven years have passed since that stunning photo — before the release of this image from NASA’s Webb telescope:
What you are looking at is the beginning of time. Someday, our descendants will reach those stars.
Think about those three photographs spanning over 77 years against the 4 billion of Earth’s existence.
Look at humanity’s expanding perspective over those 77 years as the lens has broadened and the aperture of knowledge has expanded.
The grainy images of a slice of cloud-covered Earth in 1946 have given way to the sublime and existential.
These images are incontrovertible evidence of the possibilities of presidential leadership, vision, national purpose and wisdom.
Reaching the stars, like repairing America, will take imagination, daring and time.
It is worthy work.
Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are vandals of humanity’s progress.
They are arsonists and nihilists who seek to take, not explore. They crave things for themselves, and reject the nobility of the idea so often quoted by Senator Robert F. Kennedy from George Bernard Shaw:
Some men see things are they are and ask, “Why?” Others dream things that never were, and ask, “Why not?”
Liberty is the engine of human progress, and the fuel for the dreams of mankind.
MAGA is destroying American freedom, opportunity, scientific progress and hope all around the world.
It is an evil cause that serves the ambitions of men and women who have embraced that evil so that they may have power for a moment which they hope never fades.
They will do anything to hold it and keep it no matter what. However, it doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to us. Just like the stars. They exist to be reached, but never held or owned. They are the twinkle of a dream that can only be reached by the American one, and that is what is fading to black when the stars can’t be seen at night.
We ought to make them stop.
I believe that we will.
We are Americans after all, and as President Kennedy once said:
We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
We remain those people even in this season of amnesia.
Whenever I contemplate that tiny blue orb floating in an inconceivably enormous universe, I can’t help recognizing that among its billions of inhabitants there is always a scattering of sick monsters dedicated to making life miserable for the rest, often in the name of “patriotism”. Their ability to attract supporters is revealing.
Thank you Steve; one of your best.