Fiction, Science Fiction, Facts and current media
I should start out by pointing out that I am bleeding heart liberal. I consider myself a sentient being, more or less. And I’m pretty liberal. Plus I vote, whenever I can.
I wrote a piece a few days ago, about the space shuttle, and before I had chance to polish and post it, I saw headline that screamed “Shattered Dreams” so I erased the whole thing, and moved on to other topics.
But the idea haunted me, especially for the last couple of days. There’s a scene from an Allen Steele novel that I clearly remember, a character makes a daring escape from outer space in an escape pod that was, I thought at the time, clearly the realm of fiction.
Out of that whole series of books, all I really recall, other than many hours of enjoyable reading, was that one scene plus the characters who the author employed to construct a space station. As side not, the only time that lifeboats and life preservers ever seem to work is in the movies, again, the realm of fiction.
After last night’s class, I was thinking about current world events, and I have sneaking suspicion that there’s something being withheld by our government. The missing piece of evidence, that one item that would irrevocably point to the need for a pitched battle, us against them, that one little piece of evidence seems to be missing.
I can’t point to a source, I can’t go on anything but an intuitive feeling, but I get a gut sense that there’s a piece to the puzzle that’s just not there.
At various family holidays, my father [nominally Pa Wetzel> would fetch up a jigsaw puzzle of sorts for the family to work on together. During the course of building some picture, he would mutter from time to time about how “your Sister is hiding a piece….” It was all in good fun.
But like that scene from Steele’s book, and like that escape pod that was developed, I wonder if there’s more to the picture. Or, in this case, what is it that the government knows, that they aren’t telling us?
Last fall, I was reading a Clancy book, and there’s one scene from that novels plot that’s haunting me now.
I still feel like there’s a piece of the puzzle that someone’s hiding – I just don’t know who – or what the piece is. Unlike a puzzle, I can’t look at a whole picture and try to figure out which piece isn’t here.
