"ONE SMALL STEP"

“ONE SMALL STEP…”

            Is anyone in the USA unaware that this week marks the 50^th anniversary of human beings stepping out onto the surface of the moon?  We are in such sad shape as a country, and we are so fearful for our future, that it is no wonder that Neil Armstrong’s touchdown on the moon on July 20, 1969, is being heralded so much.  It was an extraordinary achievement, and in light of the book and movie “Hidden Figures,” I am aware that is a deeper story than white, male achievement.

            I’ve thought about it for many reasons over the years, but two stand out.  First, I met Neil Armstrong in 1964 when he was an astronaut in training.  I was a participant in the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia that summer.  Two white males were selected from each state to attend the national camp, and I was nominated by my high school and selected as one of two to represent Arkansas.  My congratulatory letter was signed by Governor Orval Faubus, the infamous governor of the 1957 debacle at Little Rock’s Central High School, when black students sought to join with whites as students there.  My flight to Charleston, WV, would be my first airplane flight, and I was truly astonished at seeing the land, as we flew first to Cincinnati, then to Charleston.

            I loved the intellectual part of science, but I hated the physical parts of science.  I’m still enthralled by the theories, and I’m terrible at the engineering.  Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts came to the camp that summer after my senior year in high school.   I don’t remember what he talked about, but I did get my photo taken with him.  And this leads to the second reason I’ve thought about that walking on the moon in 1969.  I was living in Nashville at the time, working at Operation Breadbasket (Rev. Jesse Jackson’s group), seeking to get better wages for black workers in grocery stores and better prices and produce for the stores in poor, black neighborhoods – we were into “food deserts” before it became a thing.  I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon at almost 10 PM CDT, and I wanted to be cynical, but the monumental achievement and my connection to Armstrong kept me glued in my spirit. 

            The next day, my roommate David Kidd and I flew to LaGuardia Airport in New York, on the way to a “Radical Seminarians” conference in Deering, New Hampshire.   There were seminary students from all over the country, gathering to be motivated to oppose the Vietnam War and to mobilize against it.  I was not a particularly radical seminarian in those days, but this conference helped to change my perspective. Indeed it helped lead me in the next year to reject my automatic exemption from the military draft as a seminary student and to finally apply for conscientious objector status – that’s a story for another blog.  The connection to Neil Armstrong is that David and I had a layover at LaGuardia before our flight to Manchester, NH.  Upon landing in New York from Nashville, we learned that the Manchester airport was fogged in that morning – it would be an hour wait for the fog to clear.  As often happens in such weather situations, the hour wait turned in to eight hours, and since it was the day after the moon landing, all the TV news in the airport was tuned to one thing:  Neil Armstrong saying again and again, “One small step for {man}, one giant leap for {mankind}.”  I must have heard it at least 100 times that day, and thus I will never forget it. 

            I worked in the Roses Creek Folk School that next summer of 1970 in the Appalachian mountains of east Tennessee, and I was shocked to hear many of the mountain folk respond to my eloquent words about the scientific achievement of the moon landing – they felt that it was a lie, that humans could never walk on the moon, and that it was a government conspiracy to get more money in the budget.  As I reflect on it, there were so many streams flowing through that skepticism:  “alternative facts,” an accomplishment so profound that it is still mind-boggling, and a healthy disbelief in government communications!

            So, as I celebrate my connections to this remarkable human and technological accomplishment 50 years ago, I am aware that we separate children from their families at the border and keep them in filthy cages, that the same technology killed milions of Jews in Europe, and that 20,000 children die each day around the world in starvation-related deaths.  We’ve done a lot, and we’ve got a lot to do.