🚀 go-pugleaf

IF YOU DON'T LIKE WHAT'S POSTED HERE, DON'T READ THESE ARTICLES!

How many times do we have to say this? Just for emphasis, I'll repeat it:

IF YOU DON'T LIKE WHAT'S POSTED HERE, DON'T READ THESE ARTICLES!

You people who take positive action to read these articles and then complain
about being offended remind me of an old joke:

	The Mother Superior of a convent of nuns called the city's chief of
	police to complain about a man and a woman in a neighboring house
	who were disturbing the nuns by making love near the couple's open
	window every morning and evening. To keep the Bishop off his back,
	the chief of police sent one of his detectives to the convent to
	check out the complaint and correct the problem. The assigned
	detective went to the convent one evening and asked to be shown
	this couple. The Mother Superior took the detective up the stairs
	to the back of the convent and showed him a small window at about
	shoulder height. The detective looked out the window and could
	see nothing except sky. He told this to the nun and she replied
	indignantly:

	"Why, you damned fool, of course you can't see anything that way!
	You have to stand up on that chair!"


I also want to object to this sickeningly pious talk about the explosion of
the Space Shuttle. You all make this sound as if those seven people were
jerked off the streets against their wills and strapped on top of the biggest
chemical bomb in Christendom by agents of the same conspiracy that gave us the
Kennedy assasination and the Mediterranean fruit fly. That's bullshit. 

One of the marks of an adult is the willingness to accept the consequences of
one's actions.  The people on the shuttle crew were all extremely intelligent,
they were all highly motivated, they were all volunteers, and they all knew
(or should have known) the risk.  They accepted that risk, and they lost.

"But they're dead!", you angrily reply. Well, yeah, so they are. But I don't
believe that this country is shocked. Only those people who saw it in
person, and especially those people who had a personal investment in it (the
families of the crew members, the engineers and technicians responsible for
building and launching the shuttle) feel and *live* the shock. To the rest of
us, it's just more TV theatre.

Pick up any newspaper or news magazine and what do you read? Reports of
amazingly catholic death and destruction: 2500 people killed in a gas leak
in India, 278 soldiers killed in a plane crash in Newfoundland, 20000+ people
killed in a volcano eruption in South America, millions of people starved to
death in Africa, millions of people murdered in Cambodia, people killed in
two's and three's in auto accidents everywhere. 

I've heard that the average American child will see something like 12000
murders on TV before that child is sixteen. Go to most any movie these days
and what do you see? You see airplanes exploding, buildings exploding, car
crashes, people being mowed down with automatic weapons, people dying or
being killed in ways too numerous and too ingenious to list.

So what's the effect of all this? No one sees what happens on those screens 
as *real*. No one believes that what's printed in those papers and magazines
is *real*. It's all make believe and no matter how many times you say to
yourself "But this time it's real!", part of you believes that once the scene
is over and the photographers and reporters leave, someone will say "Cut!" and
all the dead bodies will get up, brush themselves off, and go off for a can of
Coke.

Death and destruction are not real unless they happen to us or to someone we
know. We've been inundated with scenes like this for so long that we've turned
our empathy off in self defense. We no longer feel, and *that's* the tragedy.

I have my Nomex suit at hand, so flame away.

						Carl Deitrick
						ihnp4!ihu1n!cbd

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The opinions expressed herein are mine and do not necessarily represent the
opinions of AT&T Bell Labs
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