1968.
Exuberant pop culture.
An anguished world.
Those who were alive then remember 1968 more vividly
than the years which came just before or after.
Who alive then could forget…
The Beatles.
Vietnam.
Laugh-In.
The assassinations and street riots.
And Nixon.
[‘He’s the one,’ they said.]
Then, in December, came the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the Moon,
another step in NASA’s effort to land men on the lunar surface.
Putting men on the Moon required a command vehicle to orbit the Moon
while a lunar explorer brought men down to its surface and back again.
Apollo 8 would test lunar orbiting.
And, by all accounts, the mission accomplished its goal.
But most people who remember Apollo 8 don’t mention that.
It is the photograph of the Earth,
taken as it rises above the Moon’s horizon,
that they’ll talk about.
And they’ll tell you about the astronauts’ Christmas Eve reading
of the creation story from the Book of Genesis,
which a billion people across the globe heard on live TV.
As they listened to this story of the beginning of time,
these billion people saw the Earth from the astronauts’ perspective:
Just a tiny speck of dust floating in an infinite universe.
The vastness of space made Earth’s problems seem insignificant.
And with this came a feeling of unity.
These sentiments didn’t last, of course.
But while they did, it was magnificent.
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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