Items encountered and pondered over the last few weeks, with nothing in common save the passing of the generations and other forms of individual and national mortality ...
The Navy has announced that it will severely restrict applications for astronaut training but that it does remain committed to the crewed space program.
What crewed space program? When the shuttles stop flying in a couple years, the United States will have no capability to put humans into space. We will depend on the Russians for transportation to and from that endlessly redesigned and downsized, endlessly disappointing, never-to-be-finished International Space Station. Meanwhile, China—the China that, not so many centuries ago, turned away from sea exploration, ceding the New World to the Europeans—sends its own “taikonauts” into orbit and commits to reach and exploit the moon.
For those of us who experienced and loved the great days of Mercury and Apollo, we expected to be on Mars by now. NASA has the complex Constellation program in the works to replace the shuttle—someday—and go back to the moon by 2020. Whether it will ever happen is arguable.
Other things are also over. Those of us who remember the Space Race also remember seven consecutive presidents, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, declaring that we must break our addiction to foreign oil and the profligate use of energy in general. That’s not going to happen, either. The next president’s next phony exhortation will make it eight. Maybe we’ll get to nine without a catastrophic meltdown. Maybe not.
And those of us who shared those space shots and gas lines in our youth perhaps have other things in common. Comes a day, as we grow older, we look in the mirror and no longer recognize the person we see. Perhaps the same might be said of the people we see every day, in our streets and stores, and on the tube.
Take a look at America.
When did we as a nation become so fat? Morbidly obese. People 50 pounds overweight are now routine. People 100 or more pounds over are far from uncommon. Our national response? Create new marketing categories, do commercials that pander to them, launch “Fat Is Beautiful” and “Fat Liberation” groups. Sue. Go on talk shows. Make it cool to be obese.
And how many people, especially among those of us who remember Apollo 13 and OPEC ’73, are now drugged for life? Not ghetto crackheads or trendy designer drug consumers, just people on whatever their doctors or therapists have prescribed, who won’t be getting off. Look into the eyes of some of the seniors who appear in those commercials that target seniors and soon-to-be-seniors. Insurance and medical supplies, especially. Is anybody home?
Next time you’re shopping for your food and drugs, take a close look at the reading matter displayed in the checkout lanes. Where did it all come from, this pandemic of junk that exists in predatory symbiosis with the rest of the junk industry, television and film and politics? How many scores of trillions of dollars have we spent on such trash? How many scores of trillions more?
As FDR might have put it, “I see one-third of a nation overfed, over-medicated and over-entertained.”
Maybe we’ll make it to two-thirds before the catastrophe hits. Or maybe we already have.
Credible estimates of the total cost of the Iraq war now run to about $3 trillion. If you take the position that it’s all borrowed money—that the Chinese are financing our wars—tack on another trillion for interest.
If you believe the news, Chinese economic penetration of Africa—especially exploitation of natural resources—proceeds ruthlessly. Meanwhile, the United States has responded by establishing the military Africa Command. No one knows where AFRICOM will have its permanent headquarters, since no nation on that continent is willing to host it. However, American military activity in Africa is increasing. Mostly special operations and occasional air strikes. For now.
Other news items are more tendentious. Of late, America has discovered the Millennials: those born between, say, 1982 and 2000 (definitions vary). And elder America, it seems, doesn’t like what it sees. These kids, if you believe the books and articles and TV specials and marketing studies, are self-obsessed, materialistic, technology-addled, unaccustomed to adversity and utterly intolerant of criticism. They want the world and they want it now. Others find them idealistic, but in a vapid, shallow, willfully ignorant sort of way.
Of course, the same things were said about us, especially as all that 1960s idealism segued into the “Me Decade” ’70s and the following “Decade of Greed.” But we turned out all right. Didn’t we? And don’t we have the right to sneer at those who must pay for all the mistakes we were never going to make, all the messes we were never going to leave behind us?
Whatever else may be said of the Millennials, they’re already paying. Debt’s a major issue, from college loans to the federal trillions they’ll inherit. But there’s another payment under way, one not often discussed in polite society.
It’s the Millennials who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and Africa. They’re the corporals and the captains now, the young men and women who have far more combat experience than their seniors, and who look upon them with something less than awe.
Already, the Millennials are changing the operational military, moving it toward less rigidity, greater innovation, and a new acceptance of women and gays as human beings with every right to serve. You don’t hear much about these aspects of their service. People like George Bush prefer to mutter the standard encomia. How wonderful the troops are. How patriotic and dedicated and self-sacrificing. Words to thrill any baby boomer. And anyway, Millennials aren’t supposed to be doing such things. They’re not supposed to be having such impact, or any impact. Not yet, anyway.
But it’s true. And perhaps we can see, in their way of waging this misbegotten war, some quiet hope. We can certainly see the first intimations of the passing of the Baby Boom’s decades of dominance. And maybe that, too, is reason for hope. L&P
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