Ayn Rand's "Apollo 11"

In a message dated 12/1/01 3:44:53 AM, johnf4303@... writes:

<< I categorically reject the notion that the present 'war' means we

should stop. Quite the reverse, actually. >>

I agreed! In fact if anything, this war now show to the world that western
civilization is better and stronger and more freeer than many of
mulitculturalists and too many of liberals and social conservatives has
thought. But we're not anywhere near as free or as rational like Ben
Franklin's age. We only have to witness this nonsense over the cloning and
actions againest our right to a peaceful death. It seems to me that the one
of the biggest reason why we have so much fear is that people don't
understand that we are not living in a world with limited resources. To use
an old biblical phrase from my old Christian life, one only have to "look up
and see" the vast resources of our solar system that can support trillions of
human beings and make every man, women, and child richer than any Bill Gates
today. Those resources are ours to claim now, today, with 30 years' old
worth of technology. What stop us? Failure of imagination, failure to use
our rational thought to see, and failure of will. Instead, in our fear of
poverty, we gave up our imagination and our pride and beg for bread from our
churchs and our governments. There are still a lot of people who do strike
for the stars in many different ways but most of the media and government and
not too few of corporations belongs to the beggers' class.

But let us not stop for the sake of those beggers, apparently strong they may
be, for we do have the imagination, the reason, the will to "look up and
see". Today is the day in which we work to share our vision of unlimited
human adventure. Monied captial we may lack, the capital of vision we have
in abundance. Let us invest the capital of imagination into the action of
sharing our vision with our friends, our fellow employees, our neigbors
today. Out of this sharing of vision, we can gather our powers to build
business, to build sleek rockets, to build vast suburbans of spinning
colonies around the earth, to build domed cities of garden and steel, to mine
the trillion's wealth out of astroids, and to seed dead planets into living
garden-worlds. We have the skills, the minds to do these heroic deeds. We
have nothing to lose but the stars!

Carl Mullin