Some giant leaps, some steps back

Published 12:22 pm Thursday, July 29, 2010

Forty years ago, the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon, I was in infantry school at Fort Lewis getting ready to go half way around the world to kill or be killed by people about whom I knew absolutely nothing and with whom I had no particular grievance. The contrast seemed so crazy to me.

We could put men on the moon but we couldn’t simply refrain from using our precious youth and our limited resources to wreak havoc on one another. 

I was not sufficiently naïve to think that mankind would give up war. But I would never have believed that 40 years later, after the moon landing promised a bright future based on science and rationality, we would be fighting wars based on the irrationality and arrogance of religious beliefs that should have been set aside hundreds of years ago.

As our dearly departed Walter Cronkite would have dryly observed, “That’s the way it is.”

I would add, to twist the common phrase, “It’s true, but sad.”

Ken Dammand

Marysville