Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the indomitable force folly, reached new heights Friday with a Twitter post from March 2019 expressing her gratitude for lessons she learned while on her Girl Scouts tour. Quote:
“@girlscouts is how I first practiced how to change brake fluid, start a fire, practice self-defense, recreate the NASA Challenger mission, and v importantly: learn to teach myself new skills + navigate ambiguity. 🚀
“There’s a reason a large of Congresswomen are former scouts!”
You’d think after more than two-and-a-half years, someone would have noticed this and said, “Hmm. Maybe we should park this one well off the information superhighway.” However, in the words of the late, lamented John Belushi, “But, NOOOOO!”
One can only hope the future congresswoman’s lessons on changing brake fluid and starting a fire were conducted separately and at a reasonable physical distance from one another. The danger is that the two will merge quickly.
As to what “navigating ambiguity” means, I’d just as soon not think about that one too much. AOC World doesn’t believe that anything is impossible. In fact, there can only be one acceptable interpretation of everything. Instead, let’s focus on what AOC, or whichever lackey penned this tweet, could have possibly thought “recreate the NASA Challenger mission” would imply.
Before its destruction, the Challenger had completed nine missions. It lost all its crew members. Its mission success included the following:
- Spacewalk: First from a Shuttle
- Space pioneer American women (Sally Ride, the late)
- Guion Bluford: First African-American astronaut in space
- Spacewalk is the first untethered one
- Landing at night for the first time
- Satellite deployments, rescues and retrievals
All of this was tragically overshadowed in the wake of events on January 28, 1986. Are you present on January 28, 1986? It will be hard to forget exactly where and when you saw the news. Certainly, AOC won’t forget, as she has nothing to remember of that day — given how she was born in October of 1989.
It is a relatively safe bet that Ocasio-Cortez’s Girl Scouts troop’s reenactment of anything to do with the Challenger meant pretending to be Sally Ride or perhaps utilizing a trampoline to recreate, in brief, bouncy spurts, a spacewalk. At that point, Ocasio-Cortez’s comment gets a pass. And hopefully, at no time did it involve an audience. Estes rocket and an M80.
However, briefly borrowing my best friend’s superpower of understatement, might it not have been better to say something along the lines of celebrating Sally Ride’s achievement instead of namechecking Challenger? What’s next, boasting about an ancestor’s superb gunnery skills aboard the Arizona?
This is why I am forced to put aside my snark for a moment. Examples like this show how it is sometimes difficult to interact with those of different political views but remain determined to keep things civil.
This is a moment when the only available discourse — short of unleashing the verbal hounds — is a deep sigh, followed by trying to explain that maybe it would have been better to say “space shuttle” rather than name one. Particularly the Challenger. This is an honorable name and one that deserves respect. Ronald Reagan was the Great Man.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you’re no Ronald Reagan.
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