Column By John Young
Glancing at the grocery store newsstand, I caught the Page 1 image of a rocket blasting skyward in a ball of flame.
“How many innocents will die when that hits its target?” I pondered.
Then I realized it wasn’t a missile fired to decimate but a vessel to elevate mankind to previously unreached heights. Artemis II.
What refreshment for a crew to be 252,756 miles away from us.
For once amid an inconceivable stretch of political madness, American technological might was being used not to destroy or terrorize. Not to take out apartments, clinics, and a girls’ school.
We can make something other than war. Thanks for the uplift, NASA. For a second there at the news rack, I forgot what the day’s groceries would cost me.
Six days later, the man commanding all our military technological might said he would “erase a whole civilization” over an oil-shipping crisis he caused.
Death to you all. Over the price of petrol. Over a skittish market. Over poll numbers in the toilet.
Fifty-seven years ago, people, the world over, stared at their TVs — or at the night sky if they had none — and thrust fists in the air over the fruits of the American mind. Yes, Soviets cheered, too.
Now, world over, people look at what our country is doing in concert with Israel, and what our leader threatened to do to Iran, and react in an ant pile of languages: “America elected a madman.”
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he tapped out on his device. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Did he swirl his Diet Coke in his snifter as he sampled the words? Did he imagine historians would make them his epitaph?
Ooh, war seemed like a delicacy to him over a month ago. No, there wasn’t an “imminent threat.” No, Americans weren’t in danger.
So, why? He did it because a war whisperer — Israel’s prime minister — tantalized him.
As former Secretary of State John Kerry explains, Benjamin Netanyahu has asked every U.S. president to join him in his bombing spree. And, if you act fast, you can blow the Ayatollah to bits!
Now Americans know how illusory all this is and was. Indeed, it stands to make Iran more powerful and scheming – a new North Korea, said one commentator.
Artemis II returned to an Earth more wracked with strife than the one it left.
Allies that supported our aims for generations have said of our opt-in war, “You’re on your own.”
Upon a “ceasefire” that just sounds like another con, Spain’s President Pedro Sanchez said: “We will not applaud those who set the world on fire.”
Let’s see: Wrecked alliances. A global economy sent reeling. Prices at home and abroad through the roof. Further damage by a president whose years at the helm will be, as MSNOW’s Laurence O’Donnell says, a permanent “stain on America.”
In a piece marveling at the Artemis launch, The Washington Post’s Phillip Kennecott contrasts what the world feels today versus what it did when Apollo 11 put man on the moon:
“The country that launched this mission has squandered any chance of ever saying to the world: ‘Trust us; we will use this power well and wisely.’”
The Earth remains an amazing place, and humankind remains an amazing race. But too many of its members – not just here (see, Belarus, India, Israel, Argentina, Russia) – are willing to be led by bellicose, self-enriching charlatans.
Oh, but there was good news from one such country — Hungary, where voters ousted MAGA poster boy Viktor Orban, whose poll numbers were almost as putrid as are our own authoritarian, who is similarly unpopular overseas.
Reportedly, a fawning in-person endorsement by a jetting-in JD Vance proved to be the last straw for those who wanted Orban out.
There’s hope for Earth after all.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
