A Black Feather, A poison pen... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ground control to Major Tom your circuit's dead, there's something wrong Tuesday finds me back in the office. I was going to go in yesterday, but i remembered at the last second that i had promised my neice to be one of the chaperones on their field trip to the ubiquitous Library (yes, that library that has been the point of origin for many an entry when i felt the urge to wander the streets and try to get my head on straight) pondering Saturday's newsworthy event, if for no other reason than that i remember getting up extra early before school one morning to watch her first launch when i was 9 years old. I've lsways harbored a fascination with space science and astronomy and to me, the sight of that funny looking airplane taking off from the ground like a bat out of hell was my little piece of the amazement that some other nine year olds must have felt watching the first moon launch going up twelve years earlier. I remember being in the teachers lounge running an errand 17 years ago when the Challenger exploded en route to space. I think the fascination with this and why the newsmedia, scavengers that they are, beats it to death is not simply the fact that they died, but like the people in the WTC and those four airplanes, they died in a highly unusual and public manner. I hate the way i've heard people berating the event as if these astronauts chose to die such a public death just to shift attention away from whatever else might be important. and no, death isn't always synonymous with failure, as i read in one case. Scientists and explorers sometimes die taking risks, sometimes in seemingly needless ways, but if something is learned from those deaths, then it was neither vain, nor needless, nor a failure. If you want someone to berate for beating this event like a flyblown horse carcass, blame the politicians and the reporters who hang about like vultures waiting to show the latest fragment of the ship or any of the other various and sundry memento mori or get their names in the public eye by being the latest to publicly heap obsequious praise on the victims...just don't take it out on the dead. 11:04 a.m. - 2003-02-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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