On the Clock
Today, we are on a “knife’s edge” of time. The President of the United States has the entire world holding its collective breath. Yesterday he threatened to destroy Iran; bombing their power plants and highways, sending bombers and missiles to, as he said it; “Send them back to the Stone Age”. His “deadline”: 8:00pm tonight, 3:30am Tehran time. We already have assassinated their leadership, destroyed their navy and air force, and decimated their communications. This next step is “total warfare”, when we stop attacking military targets, and begin to wage war against their populace.
Today, the Vice President of the United States is in Hungary, campaigning for the authoritarian Presidential candidate there, Viktor Orban. The opposition to Orban, Peter Maygar, is in favor of restoring democratic institutions, against Orban’s crony-corruption, and for improving relationships with the European Union. Orban is a “knife’s edge” away from being a Fascist, Magyar is a “center-right” candidate. But the man a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world, Vice President J.D. Vance, is campaigning for Orban.
1968
Yesterday a wonderful thing happened. For the first time in over half-a-century, human beings were once again circling the moon. I was thrown back to the first time that occurred, in 1968.
I was twelve years old, living in Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. 1968 was a very difficult year for America. The country was torn apart by the Vietnam War. Two important national leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, were assassinated in the prime of their lives. President Johnson chose not to run for re-election. His Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, was caught between supporting Johnson’s Vietnam policy, or gaining the anti-war support. That division led to riots at the Democratic Convention, and the eventual election of a pro-war President, Republican Richard Nixon.
Riots, war, political turmoil: 1968 was a year on a “knife’s edge”. Cities burned. University campuses were closed. Protestors faced off against National Guardsmen, putting flowers in the barrels of their guns.
Americans as One
But on Christmas Eve of 1968, Americans were, for a moment, united as one. There was Christmas dinners, presents around the tree, but more importantly we huddled around the television that evening. Three Americans were doing the impossible: they were orbiting the moon. And we were all there, watching, as Apollo 8 came out of the communications blackout around the far-side of the Moon, and, for the first time, saw earthrise over the lunar surface.
Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders read to the world the first words in the Bible, the book of Genesis. As the on-board camera panned the moon, Borman intoned, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. Then, as the camera tilted to see the earth, the “big blue marble” rising, they continued “And God said, let there be light, and he separated the light from the darkness”.
I was a kid, sitting on the living room floor at one of Mom and Dad’s friend’s house. We were there for dinner, but stayed to share in the moment, with the rest of the country. As divided and angry and riven as Americans were; for that moment, we were one. It didn’t “fix” our world, but it made us realize that the seemingly infinite problems really were finite to a small “blue marble” that we all shared.
The Dark Side
Yesterday we (humans, Americans and a Canadian) were back. I sat in my own family room, now sixty-nine years old, and marveled as the Artemis crew came out from the dark-side of the moon. I don’t think the whole world was watching. We are again torn, again facing war, again agonizing over political choices. And today, with viewing so personalized (not the three channels of the 1960’s) most probably missed it. Jenn and I had to download the “NASA app” to see it in real time.
And even though we again saw how finite our earth is, like 1968, it was just a moment, in our knife’s edge world. Most of the world takes going to the moon again for granted – I guess they’re waiting for 2028, when Artemis IV will actually land on the moon. Just like we took it for granted in the 1960’s that humans were on the moon to stay, after we landed in the summer of 1969.
There’s nothing pre-ordained here. We went to the moon in 1960’s and 70’s, then abandoned the effort. And we spent another six years in Vietnam, another 20,000 Americans were killed.
We are on the knife’s edge today. Our world changed for the “good” yesterday, but by tomorrow, we may be in a full-scale war. Today we take a deep breath – then hold it to see where our world will go. Is it a future in space?
Or another war in a far-off place?
