Hello Fault Line and thread,
What a heartbreaking day it's been, in the midst of a time when we're worried about our safety as a country and about how best to uphold our ideals in a world which seems to grow more complicated every day.
The explosion of the Shuttle Columbia this morning has had me and my husband in tears on and off all day. My sixteen year old doesn't understand why we're so upset by what seems to her to be yet another tv disaster. I've written this for her and I hope you'll indulge me in my sharing it here:
Your dad and I grew up in the last half of the twentieth century, a time when America was just beginning to pull itself up from a long dark period of war. Both our fathers fought in World War II and we remember hearing of the daily sacrifices our families made during that time. Our own births in the 1950's were part of America's healing and moving on.
One of my earliest memories is of standing with my grandmother at the window over the kitchen sink. My grandmother is pointing to the night sky, explaining to me that a very brave astronaut named John Glenn circled around the earth that day. "If we can do something as wonderful as that" she said "then surely we can make the world a peaceful place for you and your children to live."
In those years, we heard a great deal about space. It was to be our last frontier. President Kennedy made space exploration a priority and news broadcasts regularly focused on the takeoffs and the splashdowns. Men walked on the moon. We knew their names. They were our heroes.
There was talk of colonizing the moon one day, and regular folks who weren't professional astronauts were included in the plans for space travel. Then on January 28th, 1986, seventeen years ago almost to the day, the space shuttle Challenger exploded less than two minutes after liftoff. The crew included seven people, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who was selected from eleven thousand applicants to be the first teacher in space.
That January morning, the liftoff was broadcast on television as usual. The entire country watched the shuttle lift, shudder, and explode with sickening clarity.
The sky at the Kennedy Space Center that morning was an impossibly deep blue, eerily like the sky in New York City on the morning of September eleventh, 2001. It was on that morning that I, now near the age my grandmother was when John Glenn orbited the earth, saw the same kinds of explosions in the same kind of sky. I saw that our world would not be the peaceful place that my grandmother had spoken of. I thought of you, daughter, having spent your childhood in the luxury of knowing you would be well-fed, warm, and safe, having to spend an adulthood in much the same circumstances my parents did.
So much has changed in the last year and a half-- in the world, in our country, even in our neighborhood. A number of our friends have lost their jobs. A number of our friendships have been strained to the breaking point by the political stances we have taken about going to war in Iraq.
Our world seems smaller and meaner now, far less shiny and hopeful than it was in the days when we thought 'the final frontier' was space. A year and a half ago I learned that we've not yet begun to understand this frontier, we've not yet learned to live peacefully and respectfully of each other and our own planet.
Today, watching the space shuttle Columbia explode in the same kind of blue sky, I started to think that maybe this is a time in history when things come apart. I am no great student of history, but I know there is a general pattern of times of building and coalescing, followed by times of undoing. I hope this has not been the beginning of one of those times, but I could not help but see, as I watched the Columbia break into pieces, pieces of my vision of America's hopes falling to the earth as well. |
