Greetings, first time poster here and I haven’t formally introduced myself to the community if there is a specific place to do so because I am in a rush to get this particular issue posted while it’s fresh in my memory. So without further ado here goes.
I’m 53 and I have a half brother (dad’s side) who is a little over 4 years younger than I am. We didn’t meet until 2014 because our dad left my mother when I was a baby and moved from the east coast (Connecticut) to Colorado where he had my brother with a different woman. Family stuff aside, I really don’t blame him. My mother was enough to drive just about anyone away. I also have no hard feelings, hold no grudges, nor do I carry any mental baggage around with me from any of this. This also has nothing to do with the subject of this post so please bear with me for a short time as it will get a bit more interesting-ish.
I got into a serious situation in Maine, which is where I was raised afrer I was moved there from Connecticut as a small child. My mother decided she didn’t want a boy so she abandoned me with her mother, my grandmother, who was not in good health so my uncle, mom’s brother dropped out of Army ROTC to come home and help her with me. My grandmother passed away before I started grade school which left me in the sole care of my uncle throughout my schooling which I ultimately ended up dropping out of to attend night school so that I could get a job. My uncle taught me many useful skills however social skills was unfortunately not one of them. I had to figure that stuff out all on my own through trial and error as an unfortunate poor kid among a plethora of social classes and cliques in a small Maine city.
Some of this was good in a way however much of it was not, so much. I seemed to get bounced around a bit between some of the upper class kids because of my grades and the advanced programs that were available to those of us with the very highest. I was a poor kid but I was a straight A kid until 7th grade so I was included in the gifted and talented program where I continued to exceed in my use of the limited educational systems of the day. But that’s where that life ended. We moved to a different part of the city and the other kids in that neighborhood were much different than where I had lived up until this move. I was also a little older and allowed outside more so I had more exposure to this new group of kids who were then a bit older than me but it didn’t take me long to catch their attention. This new group had long hair and wore heavy metal oriented t-shirts, jeans with holes, and jean jackets with Iron Maiden Eddie patches. I had only been exposed to classsic rock until then so when I started hanging out with these guys and experiencing pot, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC et all it was an entirely new and quite interesting time and that was a turning point for me. I dropped out of day school and got a job so that I could buy weed, beer, and concert tickets.
I’ve been through a lot in my life with many experiences through a wide spectrum of subjects and conditions and I’ve learned to do many things, mostly out of necessity because I’ve never been able to afford to pay others to do things that I am perfectly capable of learning how to do on my own with those early tools that my uncle taught me about mechanics and wood working among many other things and also things that I learned from other people and that which I have just learned solely on my own such as building telescopes.
Owning a decent telescope saves money and still allows us to look much more in depth into what’s going on around us out there. Now I’m not any scientist but it certainly seems to me that all the other objects that are visible out there are spherical. I also get the feeling that I am standing on a ball. I don’t know exactly how to ex[lain that. I just feel it and I have always felt it.
Upon meeting my brother I found it very interesting that we shared so muvh in common. We are both painters by trade, and very good on es at that. we have many things
that we both agree on and do many things the same way and we generally have the same mindset considering how we view most things about life and the world around us. However, there is one very big disagree Iment. I believe the world is indeed a globe and he is a flearther. And I have a hatrd time believing that he thinks the world is flat because I believe that he is a very intelligent man and that any inelligent person wouldm’t possibly think that the world could be flat. And I am under the impression that he thinks I’m also pretty smart just as I’m sure he has a hard time believing that I think it’s a sphere. I have tried to entertain a few of the videos that he’s told me I should watch in order to support the theory and they all left me with the same impression that all who subscribe to the theory and attempt to support it are just plain nuts. None of what I have seen and heard and read makes any sense to me nor is any of it convincing and it’s all just a big bunch of hogwash to me and all the information that I have gathered about the subject including the people who have published it is preposterous and I can’t find a single piece of what they consider evidence that even makes any sense at all and I find all flearthers, including my brother just plain looney. This makes it difficult for me to want to even be around him because it always seems to come up in conversation at some point every time we try to spend any time together and when it does it irritates the living heck out of me and I have to find a way to end the conversation as politely as I can and find an exit strategy so as to not further damage the relationship we have nor severely insult his inelligence by lashing out about just how effin crazy I think he is for even considering that we are on a flat plane and that all the things that point to the idea and all those who subscribe to it belong in a mental facility undergoing severe treatment regimens to treat them for utter madness and ask him what sort of brain rot has infested his thought process which would cause him to feel the way he does. But each time I bite my tongue, clench my jaw shut, laugh inside my head, and feel saddened that we can not spend any more time together talking about the things that we do have in common which are many and some of which could lead to some very positive things for both us and those around us and even for the world. The very big beautiful spherical world that we exist in.
So my question is this. If this is such a heated and controvercial topic among scientists and other professionals, why haven’t we sent a few of the top guns in the flearther community up in one of the space rides to squash this ridiculous idea of a flat world once and for all? Certainly there must be enough of us who find the theory a complete joke and an insult to the laws of the universe and would be willing to pitch in enough to send them up. I don’t have the means to pitch in any large sum but I would certainly throw down what I could in an effort to see this crap put to rest and if I did have the means I would fund it entirely in order to shut them the heck up bevcause it’s really starting to get on my nerves! And I’d love nothing more than to have a normal relkationship with my brother!
