Man and the Moon

{This post was originally published March 19, 2011, on my personal blog.}

Tonight we piled into the car, the older boys and I, and Charlie gasped at the sight of the moon. “The moon! It’s huge and it’s gold!”

It was a gold moon, at least at dusk. As the night wore on, it became big and bright, the super moon that people have whispered about for weeks. As we drove home, we looked at the moon.

Last week, I chaperoned a field trip to Kennedy Space Center for Mason’s third grade class. We don’t live very close to the center, so it was a big field trip requiring about nine hours of time including travel and about a zillion components to the child care arrangements I had to make for the other two children and the puppy, but it was worth it. I hadn’t been to the center since I don’t even know when — probably since my very early 20s — and Mason had never been.

I walked Mason and his friend around the exhibits, and I enjoyed how much the two of them really appreciated the magnitude of what we were seeing. We walked into the Space Shuttle Explorer, and touched the walls with the kind of halting, hesitant touch one usually uses in holy spaces. They giggled and squealed in the simulator that made us all feel like we were actually blasting off in a shuttle (including incredible gravity effects that made us lose our breath). They stood in awe of the giant Apollo rocket that hung above our heads while we ate overpriced hamburgers at one of the cafes.

After taking a bus out to the launch pad area, our eyes glued to the peaks of the rocket boosters of the Space Shuttle Endeavour already on its launch pad, we piled into a screening room to watch an introduction to the Apollo program exhibits. The theme of the screening was 1968, and my two little charges’ minds were blown by the examples of how much has changed since then — the price of gas, the price of movie tickets, the price of a Whopper.

Towards the beginning of the short movie about the Apollo program was a clip of JFK, talking about why Americans were trying to go to the moon. The Soviet Union had beaten us to space, after all. But now, even though our first attempt was not successful, we were determined not only to go to space, but to the moon. It was the stuff of fairy tales and The Twilight Zone, I imagine.

President Kennedy was speaking to a football stadium full of people at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It was September 12, 1962.

 But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

The words struck me, and I hoped that Mason was listening to them the same way I was. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.  Because that’s what we do: we choose to do the hard things. We choose to go to the moon.

You can tell me that our country is a hot mess. You can say that politics are polarized beyond functionality, and they are. You can bemoan the youth of today, the broken education system, the pathetic and ridiculous state of health care. We have so many problems. And today, with so many American service men and women still in Afghanistan, still in Iraq, and still in Japan under threat of radiation, we bombed Libya.

I look at my child, and I see hope. Because when I told him the space program is ending, and when he heard the tour bus driver remark that although a summer launch is planned, there is no funding for it, he blanched. Of course we can’t end the space program, he protested. We can’t. Why would we do that?

Money, I told him. We cannot afford it. It is an answer he, like so many children in our country, has come to understand and know well these past few years.

But we can’t, he said firmly. We have to keep going to the moon. Of course, he is right. We have to go to the moon.

If we have to go to the moon, I have to believe that we will figure out a way to make the rest of things things right. We have to do better, because we — under the hairshirts of so many issues, so many problems, so many hurdles of late — we are still that country that said, We are going to go to the moon because it is hard. And we did.

We have it in us. Right now it is dark. Japan is under an ominous, huge dark cloud of despair. The Middle East is a field of land mines, literally and figuratively. Our country — a country full of people that I believe, at heart, are still dreamers and doers — is a mess. But over us all tonight shines a crazy bright moon, beckoning us to remember how small we are, how big the universe, and how very essential it is that we remember we are all in this together. We owe it to our children to remember.