going to Mars

Image by Martin Cathrae via Flickr

For the life of me, I don't get why people want to go to Mars. I barely make it to Santa Cruz twice a year.

I know that Neil deGrasse Tyson is all excited about space and space explorations and he's one of the coolest guys in existence, and Stephen Hawkins thinks humans should colonize space, and Obama has some unspecified plans to have someone approaching Mars in 2030. But the idea that "we must make sure we survive and continue," as Hawkins says makes me cringe.

I think the human experiment is starting to look a lot like a failure.

From God's perspective, we failed eons ago and never again proved deserving, even though He supposedly made another covenant with the human race. Just look at the story of The Flood. Before the rain started falling, Noah, the guy whom God Himself chose to preserve our genetic code, did not show any concern for even one other human being who was going to go under water. He probably thought, as long as I got my ark, to hell with the rest of humanity. So obviously empathy is not a strong human trait that emerged from the Flood. Then, the moment he got out of the ark, he got drunk and did something no one wants to talk about with one of his sons, while the other two were watching (this part is naturally not included in the illustrated bible for kids) and then blamed his son and cursed him. What this says about the kind of men who emerged from The Flood, I don't even want to begin to comment.

Fast forward 5,000 years. It still doesn't seem to get better.

When Obama was elected it looked like humanity was putting itself on a rosy path. Kind of. For a blink of an eye. But then, the crazies became so loud, they've been drowning the sane with their noise. I mean, look at the latest win of Rand Paul, the tea party/libertarian guy from Kentucky. The online buzz is all over the place with every crazy thing he's been saying lately, from Obama being un-American for criticizing BP's oil spill, to telling Rachel Maddow that business owners should have the right to bar non-whites from their lunch counters. He has reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That makes me nervous.

This kind of thinking is so passe'. I mean, when people like him ruled the world maybe it made sense to them to think that they can do whatever they want. But let's look at this not so hypothetical situation: Here's a middle aged white guy, opening his business, putting a sign on the door, no black, no browns, no yellows, no Jews, no Muslims, no gays and lesbians. Then one day, let's say some young kid with a gun enters his business and tries to rob him. The guy calls 911. The kid shoots him and runs with the money. A police patrol car screeches to a halt outside, and the black policemen rush to the door. Oops, no blacks allowed. So they call a backup and a white policeman comes in, surveys the damage, calls an ambulance. The paramedic shows up, but he's a brown guy. Can't go in. The white policeman drags the injured business owner out. Takes him to the hospital. Ouch, now it's your Muslim guy who was turned away from that place by that very sign that was placed on the door, and he's the ER guy for the entire night. Ok, so you see where this is going.

My point is, that regardless of all the anti-discrimination laws and indignation of decent people, what these guys, these racist guys, don't get, is that now everyone is connected, and blacks and browns and yellows and Jews and gays are all over the place and we all need each other, we are all connected to one another in one big web of life. Maybe in the old days Rand Paul and his ilk were the sheriffs and the firemen and the doctors and the bosses of the world, but no more.

And can you imagine what will happen to him and his ilk if the government is out of the picture and the police will be run by a private company, all non-whites, and the hospital will be privatized, and run by another minority they dislike, and you see where I'm going again. So this guy, who hates government and everyone who is 'other' will have to go to an establishment run by the government because only those who work for the government will not discriminate against HIM! Luckily for him, the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not allow for government institutions to discriminate against people like him.

So I think that until we get the human race in a better shape, we should let other civilizations colonize space. Or maybe send Rand Paul and his friends up there. Let them harass the space aliens, and be harassed right back.