This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time

[athelind]

Last year, I posted an LJ entry that said that the defining moment for our generation wasn't when man set foot on the Moon, but when we turned away.

Most of my commentators, bless their literal souls, thought I was just talking about the space program, and at that stage in my recovery, I wasn't quite up to clarifying the symbolic and metaphorical

Comments

[paka]

I do think the effective end of the space program is a valid point for metaphor;

1. The newly-minted Ming China launched a huge number of voyages overseas with its new found prosperity. There were Chinese ships anchored off what's now Kenya. And then boom, nothing. The Ming government decided that it was too expensive to do this stuff. China became a rural, backwards backwater instead of the world spanning power she had no reason not to become. Fast forward a few centuries and China paid for that mistake, big time. Even Portugal, the big loser in Europe's race to explore, wasn't subject to being invaded and divvied up by foreign powers while her people languished in poverty with a backwards looking government. With space, we are now repeating that mistake.

2. The space program has done some badass stuff, like Gravity Probe B. So the dream isn't dead at NASA either, but it mirrors the larger scale dream; the guys on the top are about profiteering, channeling more money to their meaningless exploitative bullshit, it's us little people who try to work in an attempt to actually do something meaningful in the spaces left.

The thing about protests is this; you cannot resort to violence. Literally, you can't. It doesn't matter how pissed off you are, because this is about the media and public perception. The police can smash cameras, mace, corral, tear-gas, rubber-bullet, beat, firehose, harass, detain for hours, the media can ignore protestors, the politicians can dismiss us as a tiny minority which doesn't really represent the public (I protested that war; I was there). But the moment someone puts a rock through a window, or a single fist connects to a policeman's chin, immediately every mainstream media thing in the country will slag us as those horrible violent awful liberals, and that's what the public will believe because it's been screamed at them so often. We must follow in the footsteps of Gandhi or King if we want to make any point at all. The danger to this is what you are seeing now; since nobody is being hurt it is easy for the collaborationist media to downplay any protest movement. Thankfully, as in Egypt and Iran, there are ways around the official media sources.

[athelind]

Bingeaux.