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Sally M from CO, in an email writes:

If you have any question about omens in our lives, this one kinda begs the question. The space shuttle broke up over the middle of Texas right over "Palestine" Texas and the first Israeli ever in space was onboard. This is tragic and if I were GWB, Israel, and Palestine, I would be reviewing the future.

Tony writes in:

Carrying this further, can't Columbia be considered another name for the US? And there is speculation that the "left wing" was damaged on takeoff, which may have precipitated the ultimate destruction. Hmmm... I don't really believe this stuff, but...

Seeing the explosion of the shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, was quite a moment of mass media awareness, I recall. It's another one of those events so catastrophic, that those of age in the 1980's will recall where they were at when it broke through their awareness. The symbolism was as raft then as it is now.

I have a sweet memory of the Columbia. During my twenties, after another one of those all-niters in college, we were awake, and outside at dawn, at a rock quarry near the foothills of the Ozarks in Arkansas. On the eastern horizon, we watched, unknowingly, the Columbia re-entering the earth's atmosphere, just above the rising Sun. The experience was extraordinarie.

The space shuttles manifests an idealistic ethos in our culture. Maybe it's that which yet still remains from the whole mythos created around our exploration of space during the Kennedy Presidency. The myth that spawned the image of the earth from space, the Gaia. Sure, it's myth, --one doesn't need to leave the planet, see the earth as a whole being, to understand that we are all one people-- but the picture makes for an easier job.

The real work: of convincing those that are more inclined toward endgames of death rather than diplomatic solutions of peace; those quick to threatening conflict rather than the hard work toward resolution; and those who efforts are toward the manipulation and exploitation of fears rather than the overcoming of their own demons which they project outward-- that they are wrong, and need to re-examine their lives and actions.

It's 640 days until the defeat of George Bush the second; set course for a new beginning.

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