This story may be true, or it may be untrue, but all the characters are fictional.
Read this story only if you have nothing else constructive to do.
Little Johnny is in Kindergarten, and he’s 5 years old. His teacher, Miss Gertrude von Braun, was so impressed with how Little Johnny had handled himself in a recent conflict, she made a recommendation she never made before. Before we get to her extraordinary recommendation, perhaps it would help to tell you what impressed her so much about Little Johnny.
If you’d like, you may listen to this story rather than read it.
Miss Von Braun has taught kindergarten for 66 years, and her passion to manipulate childrens’ minds, I mean stimulate childrens’ minds, is unparalleled. Since she was raised in the era of exploration in outer space, and since her own grandfather became a scientist for NASA after a prominent career as a NAZI scientist for Hitler, she spends all her time watching NASA videos and reading about the latest space discoveries. She’s particularly fascinated with theories of dark matter. This is why she has never married, not because of her obsession with dark matter, but because she never has any free time.
She has always decorated her classrooms with a theme of astronauts and rockets and images of galaxies billions of light years away. She is convinced such imagery stimulates creativity in her students, and she often dreams of traveling to a distant galaxy where she meets the alien of her dreams, but she knows that is unlikely to happen during her lifetime.
A passion like Miss von Braun’s, can be infectious, especially around young impressionable minds, and just like a virus from a Chinese bioweapons lab, her passion usually spreads among the children each school year, at least among the slower students who go along to get along.
It was a gloomy winter morning, NASA had cancelled it’s scheduled launch because of the weather, and all the children had their foreheads resting on the backs of their palms on their desktops as they took a short rest, which they do everyday after their playground time. Miss von Braun was sitting at her desk as she usually does browsing her laptop for “Today’s Featured NASA Images.” She discovered she has to be circumspect about this, because more than a few times she accidentally drooled on her “dirndl” as she became mesmerized while gazing at images of brightly colored stars and galaxies. While drooling on her dirndl has never been a concern outside the classroom, in the classroom one of the children would occasionally raise their heads during rest time to see her drooling, and burst out chuckling. The entire classroom, as if on signal that Miss von Braun was drooling again, would all burst out in hearty laughter. While she is used to humiliation, she finds it uncomfortable.
But the day came when the success of Little Johnny’s programming revealed itself, and Miss von Braun had such a sharp epiphany, she fell out of her chair and rolled out from behind her desk.
Exactly what gave Miss von Braun that sharp epiphany? After the children finished their short rest time, one of her prettiest students, whose name is Angel, declared by “their” parents to be gender neutral, shared a traumatic experience on the playground involving Little Johnny.
Angel had a lunch ticket which “they” showed Little Johnny after Little Johnny accidentally knocked Angel off the swing and Angel bruised “their” forehead in the sand. Little Johnny asked if he could hold the ticket to see it closer, to which Angel agreed. After looking at the ticket for a few seconds, Little Johnny put it in his pocket and ran off. Without a lunch ticket, Angel, who already was underweight, would likely get skinnier.
After hearing the distressed pleas of Angel, Miss von Braun decided to have a one-on-one with Little Johnny. Whenever she had to have such a talk with one of her students, she used a psychological tactic intended to disarm the student so the student would tell everything without any awareness that the student’s own life could be at risk. At this early age her students were unaware of their 5th Amendment rights on self-incrimination, their 4th Amendment right to privacy, their 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and of course the students were never aware of their 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. When, not if, the student admitted their sins, Miss von Braun could use that information against them, but the exercise also gave Miss von Braun an opportunity to gain insight into how a young mind would handle psychological trauma.
The conversation went like this:
Miss von Braun: Little Johnny, did you take Angel’s lunch ticket and keep it?
Little Johnny: That depends on what you mean by keep.
Miss von Braun: How could you justify taking Angel’s lunch ticket?
Little Johnny: That’s easy. I deserved her lunch ticket more than she did.
Miss von Braun: Do you feel you are entitled to other people’s things?
Little Johnny: Oh yes, of course. I remember what you taught us Miss von Braun, that we all came from primordial soup and from apes, and how the whole universe is just . . . I think you said some kind of accident. So I figured to have a little accident of my own on the playground. Believe me Miss von Braun, there was no rhyme or reason to what happened.
Miss von Braun: And you think you can justify that as an accident?
Little Johnny: Yes, maam. If you were an accident, and I was an accident, and Angel was an unfortunate accident, and the entire universe and the whole earth came from an explosion from nothing, then that lunch ticket could surely find its way into my pants pocket. It’s just happenstance maam. There’s no meaning to it. Right?
Miss von Braun: Don’t you feel even a little guilty for what you’ve done?
Little Johnny: How could I maam? As you taught us, there is no God of creation, and if there’s no God, how could there be guilt if I never committed a sin?
Miss von Braun: Did you also spin Angel on the merry-go-round until she threw up?
Little Johnny with a big smile: Yesss maaaam. I did, but I spun the merry-go-round in the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation, so if anything she should have felt herself slowing down in . . . I think you call it a “time-space continuum.”
Miss von Braun: What about the throw up?
Little Johnny: Do you have any CGIs?
Miss von Braun: Did it occur to you that Angel might get hungry without lunch? Did you think about giving her ticket back, especially since you already have three lunch tickets in your other pocket, and I’m not going to even ask where those tickets came from?
Little Johnny: Oh yes, maam. I truly was going to give it back. I was, but when I took it out of my pocket, the wind caught it, and it took off across the playground. I chased it to all the way to the barbed wire fence around our playground, but it suddenly shot straight up like it was caught in some sort of black hole.
Miss von Braun: Little Johnny, there are no black holes on earth. Maybe you meant a micro-tornado or an updraft?
Little Johnny: Yes, what you said. I watched that ticket go higher and higher, until it went completely out of sight. Maybe the ticket is on an alien space ship now, or maybe it’s going through the Van Allen Radiation Belt into outer space. Maam, do you think NASA astronauts will see it someday through the window of their space ship while they’re looking at the blue earth?
Miss von Braun: Are you sure you don’t have that ticket still in your pocket?
Little Johnny: Oh no, maam. It disappeared forever, just like all the data and the tapes and the photos from NASA’s trip to the moon. Remember how it all magically disappeared maam? That ticket did the same thing. I can’t explain it, maam. No one can.
Miss von Braun: Little Johnny, what do you want to do with your life?
Little Johnny: Miss von Braun, I know exactly what I want to do. I want to go where no man has ever gone.
Miss von Braun: I’m sorry Little Johnny, but the school district’s policy now allows boys into the girls bathroom since we no longer have genders at this school.
Little Johnny: No maam, I didn’t mean that. I mean outer space. I want to be one of those clowns in the space suits.
Miss von Braun: Do you mean astronauts?
Little Johnny: Yes maam.
Miss von Braun: Why Little Johnny? Is it about becoming rich and famous?
Little Johnny: Oh no, maam. It’s not the money. No. I want to be an astronaut because you got me so excited about exploring the last frontier in space. It’s about . . . what did you say, “something bigger than me and bigger than all of us.” I want to do things that are impossible. I want to live without accountability to anyone, except NASA, and I want to wear one of those cables the astronauts wear when they pretend to move around inside a space shuttle. I want to be a conspiracy, maam.
Miss von Braun: Little Johnny, you’re only 5 years old. Why are you so certain you want to work for NASA and be an astronaut?
Little Johnny: Because you can say anything and everyone believes you, maam. You don’t have to have any proof or anything. You can just make stuff up about what happens in outer space or on those space ships, and no one will ever know. I don’t have to say, “The dog ate my homework, because no one believes that anymore, especially because I have a cat,” but I could say, “My homework got sucked out the portal of the space ship into the vacuum of outer space.” No one can ever disprove that, maam. I can lie for a whole career, and if anyone doesn’t believe my lies, all I have to say to win the argument is, “Follow the science you idiot!” That’s for me. It’s not about the money. It’s about controlling people, like I controlled Angel. I was just being a good NASA clown on the playground, maam.
Miss von Braun: Astronaut.
Little Johnny: Right.
Miss von Braun: Fine then. You go sit down Little Johnny, and don’t steal any more of Angel’s tickets, or I’ll have to start lying for you, too.
It was at this moment that Miss von Braun realized she had a genius among her students, one who as far as she could tell had pre-qualified to be the perfect NASA employee. She opened up her laptop and looked at what she had been reading before her talk with Little Johnny. She read it again:
“Named for the father of modern rocketry, Robert H. Goddard, the Goddard center was created on May 1, 1959 and is home to more than 8,000 scientists, engineers and researchers engaged in understanding Earth science, the solar system and the universe beyond. The center’s current director wrote, ‘Engineers and scientists did not go to work for Goddard or NASA for money. They went to work there because they were fired up with excitement over the prospect of exploring a frontier no human had entered before.’”
This was the sharp epiphany. She knew it then. Miss von Braun knew immediately she had to write to NASA’s HR department, and tell them about Little Johnny. The perfect place for him would be the Goddard Center at NASA. They might as well open a file on him and start his Resume early.
Miss von Braun sat back with a deep sense of contentment. “This is why I preach, I mean teach. To mold impressionable minds and fulfill the evolutionary mission so long as I walk or crawl on this globe. This is what it’s all about. This is who I am. This is what I do.”
She finished her letter to NASA with what she thought was the ultimately persuasive argument, “I am certain Little Johnny has the right mindset and personality that could be molded precisely to suit NASA’s heliocentric vision. I have laid the foundation for you by thoroughly brainwashing him with all things NASA and Darwinian. He is the perfect Manchurian candidate. I should know as I was selected for the MK Ultra program myself when I was his age, and look how I turned out.”
