As the Curmudgeon says, you can’t make this stuff up. Homeland Security: that organization whose name just begs one to say Vaterland Security, has handed another gift to comedy writers and cynics by blocking a visit of a kindergarten class to NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Normally and traditionally NASA has sought to get the attention of younger generations and attract them to the sciences, but that was before the Keystone Cops took over national security, demanding, among other things that they keep quiet about science when it offends Bush’s fundamentalist base.
The Ohio Free TImes tells us that although some 400 school groups have already toured the facility, the kindergarten class at Lakewood Ohio Taft Elementary School is too dangerous to allow in the building. Two toddlers in the class are not US citizens and while to some extent, all 6 year olds are terrorists, very few are able to ferret out the kind of secrets from rocket scientists that might be useful to older terrorists, nor are they likely to build homemade cruise missiles after a brief tour of NASA. I feel safe in saying that the citizenship of a kindergarten kid really doesn’t matter here in terms of making us safer much less saner.
“It was just a policy that came down from the Homeland Security Department,” said Chief Community and Media Relations Officer Linda Dukes-Campbell, who disavows any connection with the writing staff at Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
“We are a federal reservation, and we have to work within those ramifications” says she apparently not having spent much time learning the English language herself.
Dukes-Campbell says that NASA is “looking at a policy revision” that might allow kindergarteners onto the federal reservation for field trips. She says they’re “hoping to have language” in order in a couple of weeks. No word on whether the language is English.
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