Shoot for the Moon

Growing up anticipating the Moon Landing was quite a journey.

It started with a Cold War. As soon as I was old enough to grasp the concept of countries and politics, I was told that there was a really dangerous country called 'Russia' who was out to kill us all. ALL! Even us little schoolkids, though we were just learning how to read and right, for pity's sake.

But our teachers and parents were so certain of danger that they held civil defense drills. We marched, in line, to the school's basement and put our heads down, so we'd know what to do when the Russians dropped their bombs on us. Mom gave me a can of tuna to carry in my purse. I might be stuck in that basement for days, and she didn't want me to starve. (Although no can opener, plus I didn't bring enough for everybody.)

I never heard the details of how those evil Russians planned to slaughter us. Clearly The Moon was involved. As a cartoon-loving kid, that wasn't hard to swallow. Bad guys were always setting up death-rays and such from vantage points in space. Sure enough, Russians were conquering Space. It was SO important that we get to Space too, so we could stop them from doing whatever it was that they planned to do.

At some point you'd think my critical thinking skills would kick in, but I'd never developed any. It didn't help that on TV I saw their evil leader banging a shoe on a desk to drown out whatever our president was trying to say. The evil leader's sound-bite, "We will bury you!" was played on the media hundreds, no, thousands of times.

Every rocket, every orbit, every safe landing was another triumph for us, the good guys. We just had to get to Space, and The Moon, first. Through the 60's I joined the nation in cheering for our brilliant scientists and our brave astronauts. Naturally I watched the Moon Landing. The whole family was glued to the living room TV for the moment of triumph. There was much hype and fanfare.

The actual stepping out of the capsule and onto the moon was a bit underwhelming to someone who was used to TV's sound stages and decent lighting. A blurry guy in a space suit stepped down and said, "Az unh snap kkrackle pop oh ann oh eye eep oh zzoe kkiyi." At least that's how it sounded to me. The whole family leaned forward and said, "Huh?" The network commentator kindly told us what the actual words were, and we were suitably impressed.

There were more moon spectacles to follow, but I didn't follow them so much any more. We'd gotten there, we'd put down a flag, we'd had our "moment" of national pride and patriotism. Perhaps it was time to move on?

I moved on... to high school and college. The rest of the nation moved on too, depending on where they were in life. There were jobs to do, a pesky war to fight, families to raise, movies to see, and stuff to buy. The Moon had been eclipsed.

Note: Tomorrow's blog.  Moon Landing, 20 years later.