Thirty years ago, I was going around with a ragged copy of the March 1981 issue of National Geographic, with a cover article entitled “When The Shuttle Finally Flies” – a comprehensive look at the next stage of American spaceflight. I had the Columbia’s first four mission patches, of course, stitched to my jacket along with two dozen other assorted patches. Little did I know that over two decades later, I would be a guest at the wedding of one of those astronaut’s sons – or that I would spend a year working as a contractor for NASA myself.
The thing is, even though that was thirty years ago, the launch itself was only twenty years from the day that comrade Yuri Gagarin demonstrated quite possibly the most elephantine balls of any human being in history to that date, as he climbed on an enormous pile of explosive fuel and Soviet-grade engineering and became the first person ever launched into orbit around Earth.
Twenty years from a glorified Roman candle to the space shuttle. Hell, less than nine years from that candle to human footprints on the moon. And thirty years from that shuttle to…no shuttle. Well, maybe one more.
I know every generation thinks the next one is the dumbest yet, but I think we’ve reached a point where it’s not the kids going backwards, it’s everyone else rushing to keep up with them. It’s not just reality TV, or the end of American manufacturing, or the fact that DONALD FUCKING TRUMP is leading polls for the GOP in 2012, or the fact that we don’t have a news media that could carry the ashtray of John Cameron Swayze or Ed Murrow, or the fact that public debate is carried on at the level of sports talk radio and 14-year-old gamer chat. It’s all of the above and more. It’s the size of the Farmville economy. It’s the fact that our best and brightest got routed into doing math tricks on paper to create shitstorms of fake money that got bailed out with real money. It’s the fact that nobody seems to care about it anymore. It’s the attention span that lasts thirty seconds for anything more complicated than celebrity news. It’s the fact that people have long since forgotten we have two land wars in Asia, a potential revolution on the boil in the Middle East, a Chernobyl-grade nuclear disaster in Japan, and a planet that’s slowly warming up with real and demonstrable consequences.
We’re not arguing what to do about things, we’re not even arguing about the priority of things, we’re arguing about what reality is.
And because we chose to embrace and stupidity as a valid way of life, we’re stuck in the mud, instead of grasping at stars.