Bang, Zoom

On Sunday, I did my laundry, but didn't want to go shopping or head back to my place right away. I drove around a bit and eventually ended up near the "indie" theater in town. Since I was in time to go to their early shows (Friday through Monday they have shows that start at about 10:30 AM, which is great for an early riser, like me), my brain went "What the hell?" and I parked the car and went to see what was playing.

My first thought was Lars and the Real Girl because it looks kind of funny and weird and I wasn't really interested in the others that I were up there.

Then I saw the last title, In the Shadow of the Moon. I read the little blurb about it the surviving members of the Apollo program talking about going to the moon. I knew I had to see this film.

I'm not going to go into detail about the movie. I liked it, a lot. I liked how most of the words spoken were by the former astronauts. I felt excited when Kennedy called for man to walk on the moon before 1970. I held my breath a bit when Apollo 8 came around the moon to film the first seen earthrise. I got chills when they showed the footage of Eagle landing and Armstrong stepping onto the surface. I got more chills when they went through the Apollo 13 mission. And I was a bit giddy when the men talked about being on the surface of the moon, talking about its desert like beauty. It's a really good movie.

On the drive back to my apartment, I got to thinking about landing on the moon and how it must have felt to the people of the time.

To the generation before, the people who lived and fought through WWII, traveling to and landing on the moon must have seemed like fiction. They must have thought it the politicians posturing to convince the world the US wasn't losing the space race to the USSR. They probably didn't believe it would happen.

To the generation who achieved the moon landing, those born in the late thirties and possibly saw some time in Korea, it was a challenge to be met. They may have though failure was possible, but it wasn't an option. The moon was their target, all they needed was the proper weapon to hit that target. And they succeeded. They made it to the moon.

The generation who were kids while men were flying and landing on the moon saw it as normal. It was cool, yeah, but it was something that had been done before and doing it again was no big deal. Still, it opened the universe to them. They dreamed of traveling to Mars, Venus, and Jupiter and maybe even settling there. They eventually send off probe to send back information that we could use when we were ready to travel greater distances.

For my generation and the others, who were born years after the last moon landing in 1972, it's become a story. Sometimes this story is even told in a when-I-was-your-age way by the people who lived through it, like we, who didn't, who couldn't, don't want to have people traveling to the moon or Mars, or Venus, or beyond. It wasn't our choice to stop that sort of mission. We weren't the ones who decided that more weapons were the right way to show up the USSR. (Which, apparently, it was, seeing how the USSR was bankrupt by the time I was 10.) We were stuck with what's been left over for us.

And, unfortunately, as the my generation approaches the age to start taking some control over governments, we're being left with fear of the things that are found on Earth instead of having a sense of wonder about the solar system and what's beyond. When we come completely into power, we'll probably be so stuck in the fear and our eyes will have trouble looking any higher than the horizon, which is horrible.

I doubt humans will walk on the moon in my life time. I hope that it'll happen within the lifetime of my generation's children and grandchildren, but I'm afraid that it won't.

God, I wish the people of this world were more into improving things for everyone instead of worrying about the movements of bit of paper.