“We need to focus down here, not up in space. The space pro­gram does noth­ing for us, it’s a waste of money.”

“We need to stop spend­ing money on new tech­nolo­gies and improv­ing qual­ity of life, and take care of the peo­ple we have now, still alive, instead of push­ing forward.”

“You don’t need higher edu­ca­tion. It’s a waste of money when you can work an hon­est job and live just fine.”

“There is no need for this tech­nol­ogy, peo­ple lived just fine back in the day.”

“It doesn’t mat­ter if life was rougher and shorter back then, you still had a happy sim­ple life.”

“Just take care of what we have here, now.”

We’ve all heard these lines before, com­ing from politi­cians, pun­dits, passers-by, friends, and pos­si­bly even fam­ily mem­bers. I have had the for­tu­nate cir­cum­stance of hear­ing this from all the above, raised into a fam­ily that strongly believe in the sim­ple com­forts of sub­ur­bia life in south-eastern Mass­a­chu­setts. Eat, sleep, work, con­sume, sun goes up, sun goes down, the tide goes in, the tide goes out, here are your many options and direc­tions you can only choose, live life within the means of the law and all is well. I see this as a dis­ease that has taken our soci­ety hostage for the past 30 years, an anti-intellectual move­ment that has begun to show itself openly and con­fi­dently with lit­tle backlash.

For­tu­nately my sav­ing grace was PBS. At age 12, I bought my first tv, a 13″ RCA for $168, on sale. It was my first expen­sive pur­chase ever. For two months I was harassed by my mother every­day for mak­ing that pur­chase, and occa­sion­ally for the rest of the year, but it was, in a sense, worth every penny. I wasn’t allowed to have cable tele­vi­sion attach to it, so I was stuck with a rabbit-ear antenna. Not many chan­nels came in, occa­sion­ally I got to see Bill Cosby, Fam­ily Mat­ters, and Full House, but the sig­nal was fuzzy. The only chan­nel that came in crys­tal clear was WGBH. Once I was put to bed and my par­ents set­tled in to watch tele­vi­sion down stairs, I would turn on my tv, set the vol­ume to near inaudi­ble, as my mother could hear a mouse fart from the neighbor’s house, and watch Nova. I was infat­u­ated with the show, blink­ing was not con­ceiv­able. Some­times I would get out of my bed and perch a few inches in front of the tv to get a bet­ter look of deep space and lis­ten to the sooth­ing voice of the nar­ra­tor. After the show I would spend hours lay­ing in my bed, com­pletely in the dark, trapped in my mind, going over all the intri­ca­cies I learned and pon­der about space, how it came to be, and what it all means. I would inevitably fall asleep before I had any kind of epiphany.

The show helped me real­ize there was some­thing amiss with what many, includ­ing my fam­ily strived for, that is a com­fort­able life. Where you are told what to dream; a big star, play gui­tar, eat at a steak bar, and drive a Jaguar. Every­one knows this machine, every­one is against it and every­one wel­comes it, even fights for it. They say they under­stand the entrap­ment and are not apart of it, then paint a pic­ture of their goal and make an excuse for why it’s not part of the machine. Some­times they place a bow on it with quote sim­i­lar to above. It’s fear of los­ing what they are fight­ing so hard to be against. Fear of learn­ing we made a mis­take, to admit our future could be bet­ter. Fear which has made us for­get what got us in trou­ble, and keeps us from return­ing to a bet­ter time. A goal should be viewed as a broad term only, an idea, not a des­ti­na­tion. For as soon as you reach your des­ti­na­tion, you stop dream­ing, you are lost, and then you try to hold on to what you have, only instead to expire slowly los­ing what you gained. Dreams encour­age ever chang­ing curios­ity and will keep you mov­ing and improv­ing. Life thrives because of change and manip­u­la­tion so it is only nat­ural that you should do the same in life. I have goals, pay off col­lege debt, save money for retire­ment, learn the piano, visit Bel­gium, but I have no destination.

It’s a tragedy that some don’t know why we need NASA or the need for new tech­nol­ogy, it’s a crime when we for­get, it’s a death sen­tence to ignore.

Posted from Kumamoto, Kumamoto Pre­fec­ture, Japan.