By Steve Janoski
“You guys just don’t get it,” my father, the old engineer, told me as he stood in his kitchen. “You, your generation... you guys just don’t understand how important it was.”
Being just over two decades older than I, we typically don’t have the generational disconnect that other families might; we have the same politics, listen to the same music, and generally see things the same way. But for once, I could not argue with him — this was a gap neither of us could bridge.
And even though he was just eight years old when Neil Armstrong landed on that chunk of rock that’s haunted humanity since it first looked up at the sky, that event had such an impact on him that to this day he thinks it marvelous, and there is no way that I, being born in 1984 and brought up in the age of the routine space shuttle mission, could appreciate the momentousness, or feel the disbelief, that the world felt on July 20, 1969.
I like to imagine that for those few minutes, nothing else mattered. Not the hatred that humans level against one another or the misdeeds of men past, or even the irony that the same nation that left a plaque on the moon reading “We came in peace for all mankind” was simultaneously napalming children in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
No — the moon landing was one of those grand historical pivot points, like the signing of the Magna Carta or the surrender of the Nazis, that bends everything afterwards towards it and can bring tears to men’s eyes when they think on it.
That night, it stripped Walter Cronkite of his powers of speech and left him -wringing his hands in disbelief — for once, even he was just another member of the human race — and it is still impossible to look at the picture taken by Apollo 11 of that little shimmering blue ball, teeming with life and rising from the unimaginably desolate ocean of darkness, and not realize how fragile all of it is.
“For thousands of years now it’s been man’s dream to walk on the moon. Right now, after seeing it happen, knowing that it happened, it still seems like a dream,” he said.
But it wasn’t. It was real. And it was made possible by the United States government.
It began with the Democrat Kennedy’s legendary pledge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and it ended when Armstrong stepped off the landing craft and onto the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquility. When the first phone call was received by the astronauts, it was made by the Republican Nixon.
That kind of achievement required the devotion of both parties, and the understanding that this was something that was worth it, and that we had no other choice than to take everything we’d ever learned, even through our wars, and put it into the hands of a bunch of kids at NASA and say, “We have faith in you. Do this great thing, and we will support you.”
Over the years we’ve gotten away from that, and both parties bear the blame; even President Obama made me do a face-palm when he announced the most recent cuts to NASA’s budget, which led to the scrapping of the plan to put a man back on the moon. Although some have this misguided belief that private enterprise will take up the mantle, that will not happen unless there’s enough profit in it.
Simply put, that isn’t acceptable.
Those cuts even stirred Armstrong, who generally preferred to live the quiet life on his Ohio farm, to make a rare public appearance to protest in front of Congress.
“America is respected for its contributions it has made in learning to sail on this new ocean. If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is simply allowed to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered,” he said. “I do not believe that would be in our best interests.”
Armstrong could not be more right — government exists for two reasons: to take care of children and the elderly, and to fund exploration. If it can’t do that, why bother having it at all?
And for someone like me, who spent his childhood trips to Disney World marveling at “Spaceship Earth” and wondering what the future would hold for us…well, I think it’s time to work on creating a new pantheon of American heroes before all of the old lions pass on.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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