I got to give kudos to Paul Harvey for his Saturday noon monologue. It was very well spoken. So often we see this stuff posted on the Internet and credited to Harvey and it turns out to be "urban legend." I know he said this, though, because I heard him with my own two ears yesterday.
Paul Harvey:
You are on a spaceship, you know. You had intended to leave the hazardous early exploration of space to others less timid and more skilled; sorry about that, for this minute you are on an orbiting satellite, spinning in space. Look over there in the east, the sun appears to rise. The sun"™s not rising. You on your space ship are rotating forward towards the sun. At twilight the sun will appear to be descending into the western horizon; that"™s you on your spaceship rolling away from the sun and orbiting around it.
You"™re on a space ship and the space ship is in trouble. An oxygen tank short-circuited. Your residual life support systems are limited. There is mutiny among the crew. What went wrong? Where did we get off course? Well, let"™s check the computers, let"™s backtrack and trace the trouble.
Years ago, a civil court overruled the builder of your space ship and required modifications and those modifications constituted sabotage. A rumor spread, gaining credibility with repetition that God had died. That meant our inertial guidance system no longer could be trusted. In our frantic effort to improvise another, we turned earth upside down. We piled laws upon laws seeking salvation by legislation. Crime was pyramiding 12 times faster than our population, so we passed gun laws, taking guns away from people who obey laws. With right and wrong indicators inverted, we applauded filth in the name of free speech. Your parked car is stolen, the thief may go free but you may be punished for leaving the keys where they belong. An intruder breaks into your house, you shoot him. . . He can sue you.
When we had a fixed star to steer by, we could stray off course and yet find our way back but the stars are now an oblong blur. When there"™s more compassion for the rapist than for his victim; when we reward the loafer with more after-taxes dollar than the worker; when the policeman who risks his life in a shootout with a felon subsequently finds himself on trial, then the inversion of right and wrong has resulted in a perversion of justice.
You start a business, the government says how you must run it, the law says who you must hire and the union says how much you must pay and its called free enterprise. How can we turn the world right side up again? Well, all I know to do is get in contact with the builder of our spaceship and let"™s reread his directions.
Paul Harvey: The spaceship
