Some jobs absolutely require actual training and an education in the thing you’re about to do.
Like being a lawyer. This is not something you can do just because you read all of John Grisham's books or saw every episode of "The Good Wife." You can’t just take a webinar on how to be a good defense lawyer. You need to go to law school and pass the bar exam.
Or being a surgeon. I don’t want some vet school dropout performing a risky operation on me by someone who "hardly ever" faints at the sight of blood anymore. I want someone who graduated from med school and had all the post-graduate training there is.
I don’t want someone who speaks in Uptalk Voice, which is where everything sounds like a question. "Hi, I’m Krystal? With a K? We’re gonna have a quick peekaboo at your heart, mmm-kay?"
There are also plenty of jobs that require extensive training. Maybe not an advanced degree, but they should undergo several hundred hours of training before they do the work. Nuclear safety officers, bus drivers, race car drivers, EMTs, bookkeepers, and astronauts, for example.
These are serious roles for serious people who aren’t just doing it for kicks or because they like driving fast and taking risks. (Looking at you, bookkeepers.)
So I was a little surprised to see that a Canadian model, Cecilia Rose, wants to be an astronaut and serve as one of Earth’s ambassadors, despite believing that we have never landed on the moon.
The influencer (@cecerose) says she believes all the Apollo moon landings are all fake.
Well, there are 12 moonwalkers who would disagree with you, 16 more who have flown to the moon, and thousands of scientists and engineers who worked to make it possible, and none of them have spilled the beans yet.
You’d think that after 55+ years, someone would have run out of the office, screaming, "I can’t keep this secret any longer!" and blabbed to the first reporter they found.
There are people in the highest levels of government who can’t even keep their mouths shut about their bosses’ scandals, spilling secret after secret. There are insiders who tell the media about all the juicy gossip happening in the White House. But every single one of NASA’s people has played it cool for nearly six decades and never even whispered it?
Our government is currently being run by science deniers and anti-vaxxers who would love nothing more than to prove the moon landing was a hoax, but they haven’t. That should be a clue.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think someone who believes the most important event in space-traveling history was a hoax is qualified to be an astronaut.
I don’t think she wants to be one either.
Rose said she would love to be Earth’s ambassador to the moon, but she’d much rather do it while remaining on the planet. She supposedly even called NASA to inquire about the job.
"I'm sure there are ways to communicate without risking my life," she said.
Sorry, this isn’t a remote job. You can’t travel to space from your living room, no matter how fast your wifi is.
The 26-year-old said she’s skeptical about the moon landing because she works in the entertainment industry.
"(A)fter being in the industry I'm in and seeing how advanced theatre production is, the evidence is outstanding that it's extremely possible the first ever 'moon landing' was just a movie set," she said.
Watch the special effects from 1973’s "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" to see how impossible it would have been to create a convincing moon landing four years earlier. (See the trailer on my website.) They’re so terrible, it makes a children’s puppet show look like The Matrix.
Still, don’t laugh her off as being a crackpot. Rose says people are too quick to ignore those who don’t accept widely held events and beliefs, despite decades of acceptance and mountains of evidence.
(Bet you feel guilty about laughing now, huh?)
She said she’d be happy to change her mind if she saw convincing evidence, but then she contradicted herself and said she wouldn’t accept it.
"If NASA announced another successful moon landing tomorrow, I'd still need convincing," she said. "I'm not sure exactly what proof I would need. But I'm not just going to see one statement about it and say, 'Okay, it's happened now.'"
In essence, Rose wants to be an astronaut who flies a remote mission to the moon, but won’t believe they landed on the moon unless she actually goes, which she won’t do because it’s not safe.
I don’t know what to tell you, Kid. I guess you’re going to have to trust us and meet us halfway.
But you have to leave your house to do it.
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.