#56

Well so much for Christmas 2008. More death and destruction: this time in Palestine (Gaza) and, all-be-it to a lesser extent: Israel. Of course it is an ocean of death out there in the world generally, at any time of year, it's just that this was the worst sea of carnage happening this Christmas. Happy birthday Jesus. While I as watching this 'failure of humanity to achieve a solution' unfold over Christmas on the telly, on one day of Christmas its antithesis was shown in the form of an excellent documentary... a documentary on the Apollo missions to the Moon: 'In the Shadow of the Moon'. You may be asking how I can even dare to compare the two in any way.... if you think that then you're probably only characterizing the Apollo missions as a gratuitous technological wast of money, or as some kind of macho cold war rivalry... and you have probably harped-on as to how all those millions could have been spent on feeding the poor or curing cancer....well I suppose all those arguments are valid to greater or lesser extents, but if that is all you see then you need educating my friend... I could just casually say 'you have no soul' and leave it at that like some glib bastard, but no, I will try to explain. You see, firstly, it was a mission like no mission before it, fraught with danger and unknowns at every turn (most wrong turns leading to certain death with the vacuum of space never more than a few feet away) and you can't get a bigger unknown than the Moon itself: for example, there was no way of testing its surface in advance for suitability of landing or take off: being stranded on the Luna surface for a posthumous eternity was a distinct possibility. But, endless calculations were done to back-up observation and even imagination. The best minds pawed over the problems, training and preparing for every eventuality. The pudding was eaten: all the problems were solved and it was a great success... and thus humans no longer had any excuse for defeatist pessimism when faced with new problems, no excuses for people not tackling them due to them being too difficult...in a similar way to how the election of President Obama removes some excuses for black people not to aim for high objectives or for other people not to have faith in them to achieve those objectives, many will now be greatly enthused and motivated. Both great ventures would have been abandoned before they were begun if, even for one moment, any of the cynics or realists had been heeded. But that's not even the biggest benefit that the Apollo mission has given human kind. And no, I'm not going to even mention silicon chips or how any of the other technological developments have filtered into civilian life eventually helping even some of the poorest people...no...forget anything technological... the second benefit of which I speak is even more of spirit than the first. Perhaps for this benefit, in some ideal world, it would have been better if the mission had been international or if the astronauts were not all caucasian or not all male, but none-the-less every one, but every one, around the world who had access to a TV flocked to it, not to watch the first American or the first man step onto the Lunar surface, but to watch the first person step onto the Lunar surface. This moment was for all of us, and all before us, for every human in a million years who had looked-up into night the sky at that big beautiful thing and wondered all about it. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon he said it was a giant leap for mankind... he could have easily have instead have chosen a speech mentioning the USA, and no one would have blamed him and no one could have said that was not a proper thing to say, but the fact is he didn't, and for one precious moment the world held it's breath and everybody thought of themselves not as a nationality, a race or a gender but as just human beings. Let me just spell it out: never before and never since has the whole of humanity truly thought as one people. I was only three at the time so I don't remember it live, but what I felt watching it in later years wasn't much less -- there was still a certain excitement about it, but I suspect I, and even people who watched it live, did not realise the full implications of their feelings, it is not since I saw 'In the Shadow of the Moon', this Christmas gone, that I have fully appreciated what it all meant. The part of the documentary that really made me realise it was hearing Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin tell of when they went on a world tour afterwards: every where they went they would hear enthusiastic crowds greet them with phrases like: 'We did it! We did it!' Not only did the Astronauts graciously accept this and not try and correct people by saying something like: 'no actually us Americans did it', but they were instead greatly heartened by this, and for them it was the time when they really started to realize what the whole venture had meant to all humankind: for one time at least we had all come together. So, now, I would politely ask the cynics who are quick to dismiss Apollo 11 as a reckless waste of money, to think again and perhaps one day even come to love it, love its heart, and maybe if enough of you do, us humans could once again think back to our collective human experience, endeavour and achievement and think again as one people... once in a while.