Moon Conquest

I was watching the full moon sink past the roof of my apartment building the other night, and for the first time in my life, I thought about the moon landings with a little lurch in my stomach. I grew up thinking, like every other American child, that the astronauts who landed on the moon were heroes, and that the whole NASA program is inspirational and overall positive.

But then I was watching the moon the other night, and thinking about how the only foreign objects on that body are male human footprints, an assortment of human trash, and a bunch of American flags. What kind of message does that send? Men stomp all over, leave their trash lying around, and assume that because they claimed something in the name of their country, that makes it rightfully theirs. It used to be that the sun never set on the British Empire. Now the sun indeed never sets on the American Empire, because even the moon belongs to us. With that kind of bravado and hubris, is it a wonder that everyone hates America?

During the first space race, Nixon heavily emphasized media focus on the space program, to distract and deter people from being unhappy and resentful about the Vietnam War, a war that we entered into to righteously rescue helpless Asians from evil communism and help their crippled country flourish into a beautiful, America-like democracy. We landed our men on the moon five years after we had engaged in war with North Vietnam. And if King George II's dreams had come true after he announced legislation for a new moon landing in January of 2004, we would have embarked on a new moon mission exactly five years after the start of the Iraq war.

(If this is so obvious to me, WHY aren't the rest of the American people demanding that we resolve the issues in Iraq immediately?)

It has been said that the moon landing helped chasten the tongues of irate opponents to the Vietnam war and glorified the names, however temporarily, of Kennedy and Nixon. I'm guessing that King George II wanted the same kind of warm spotlight on him so that he could go down in history, maybe as the first administration to send people to Mars, who knows.

How can anyone be patriotic when America refuses to learn from her mistakes, when we go to war time and time again with our administration piping vague excuses through our TV sets and radios, when we exhibit nothing short of intergalactic imperialism with every action we take? I was just reading about how our 'Merican military scientists exploded and increased the Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth in the 1960s! How crass can America be, to think that we own the world and all its satellites, that the earth is our plaything and we can create or destroy it and everything in and/or on it whenever we want!? How can Americans sit by and twiddle their thumbs when our entire country is and has been plunging into some sort of sick plan for world domination?

I don't even want to look at the moon now, I want to move far far away from American soil and try to forget all about America, but the problem is, nobody can forget about America, because as long as a person can see the moon, a person can glimpse American-claimed soil, we can't escape it, and for me, that's not a comfort, it's a suffocating, terrifying thought.