The dawn of a new year is an ideal time to reflect on the cosmos and our meager roles in it. Why, I was contemplating this very subject at Dan's Grouse Inn last night during the waning hours of 1963 when it struck me: why do we need years at all? Perhaps since as early as this planet first coalesced from an unremarkable cloud of dust, we've revolved around the sun. Again and again and again some more! After a few eons of this, we invented the concept of the year to make sense of this arbitrary oblong our habitable orb traces. And what has the sun done for us? Burned our skin. Blinded our eyes. Call this hopheaded pseudoscience, but I suspect the sun is even changing our climate, leading inevitably to environmental degradation, resource scarcity and subsequently a widening gap between the world's rich and poor. Sure, the sun is responsible for all life on this planet, but, given our current social and political trajectory, who's to say life was such a good invention? If you ask me, we human beings are in a rut. We're too afraid to break out of our comfort zone. We're complacent thinking in terms of "years" and predicating all our assumptions on this unquestioned construct. The only way to truly challenge ourselves as a species is to climb out of this rut, to jostle ourselves out of this orbit. I'm not speaking metaphorically here. Heck, between us and the commies we've got enough firepower to propel the earth into deep space. It's just a matter of piling up every nuclear weapon the world over in one single unpopulated location and then detonating them all at once. This ought to be enough of a blast to push this rock onto a tangential path out of this dead end solar system. How will we live without the sun? Well, we can only learn if we check our ideologies and preconceptions at the door of fate. Only then can we explore the unknown and truly grow together, united as we hurtle through the dark depths of the interstellar void.
--K. Hume O'Henderbaum
(Originally broadcasted on KRTN Radio, Jan. 1, 1964)
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