Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of the most sublime and stunning achievements in human history: the landing of two astronauts---Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin---on the Moon. No one old enough to have watched these events on their television that July 20, 1969, will ever forget Armstrong's matter-of-fact pronouncement: "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Even more stunning, maybe, was the moment when Armstrong, a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, set foot on the lunar surface.
A wonderful symmetry attached to this son of Ohio being the first human being to kick moon dust. After all, it was two Ohioans, Dayton natives Wilbur and Orville Wright, who invented powered flight; it was Columbus native Eddie Rickenbacker, the one-time Indy 500 driver and later president of Eastern Airlines, who was America's first flying ace, during World War One; and it was John Glenn, of New Concord, Ohio a Marine hero during the Korean War, who was the first American to orbit the Earth.
The primary emotion this anniversary evokes in me is wistfulness. I pine for what might have been. If we human beings could have spent a fraction of the time, effort, money, and intellectual capital we've spent on war and terror these past three-decades-and-a-half, and instead, built positively on the foundation of the first moon-landing, who knows what progress might have been ours? What new discoveries about the universe and ourselves might we have made? What new technologies and new medicines might have resulted? We'll never know because, to a great extent, we've remained earth-bound, literally and spiritually.
It boggles the mind that an event which Richard Nixon, then president, in a fit of understandable but exagerrated hyperbole described as the "greatest...since Creation," is so widely ignored today.
It's as though we've forgotten how to dream, to dare, to hope, to climb.
I hope and pray that we will learn once again to do these things. I hope that the people of the world will say, "We've been to the Moon. Let's go for Mars. Let's explore the cosmos."
From my perspective as a Christian, I believe that we have a sacred obligation to explore creation, to know it and by the knowing of it, gain a deeper appreciation of the One Who designed it all.
May the anniversary of the first Moon landing compel us to once more let our dreams take flight!
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