LIVING IN ANOTHER WORLD

Each April the Space Foundation holds its Space Symposium at the posh Broadmoor Hotel in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs. Thousands of aerospace industry operatives, military personnel, elected officials and students are brought to the event which has become almost a religious ritual for those working to move the arms race into the heavens. The Colorado Springs-based Citizens for Peace in Space holds a vigil during the annual space confab and attempts to hand out leaflets.

Here is a brief report from Bill Sulzman about the event this year:

Can't get some of the images from yesterday out of my head. At one point in our demo there were at least 100 employees from General Dynamics who crossed the sidewalk from the five-star Broadmoor Hotel on their way to the Convention center hosting the annual Space Symposium. In the middle of the pack was an actual two-star Air Force General in conversation with several of the employees. That would make a great military industrial complex poster. The event organizers say that there will 9,000 attendees in all including hundreds of school children. Another graphic image was the presence of a couple of Northrop Grumman shuttle buses all decked out in the latest corporate slogan listing all the areas of warfare that they are involved in. And finally there was the Boeing building. It was set up to handle their massive display as though there weren't enough space for that in the convention center. As usual there were very few who took our leaflets. They do live in a different world.