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Danny |
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I hate this. I am so torn. Obviously we all feel bad. Miserable. In fact it is a crying shame. Seven people gone in a flash of light. And as sorry as I am for their families and as dreadful as this story is, and will be for days, months to come, it is the cost of doing business. We still have the most successful program of any other space nation. But what is worse than the tragedy itself, as if anything could be, is the media’s treacly overbearing reaction. “A Nation Mourns” scream some headlines. Really? Put on the Home Shopping Network and see how mournful they are. “A Numb Nation” says my local paper. Oh? Wait until the body bags come back from Iraq, we’ll see how numb we get. Look, something went terribly wrong with the rëentry on Saturday and it will take teams of experts to figure it out. But they will figure it out. And we will pick up and move on. But this hideous ongoing coverage in the broadcast media, and the goopy headlines in the papers, do nothing but annoy most of us. These people got to do what they dreamed of doing their entire lives, most of them, to “boldly go” where the rest of us can only imagine. They died fulfilling a dream. How many of us in our little hum-drum lives would be capable of making that kind of commitment? And how many of us would make the cut even if we tried? I find it really presumptuous of TV anchors and personalities presuming to know what these people felt, or what their families feel now. How dare they! The same day as The Columbia tragedy there was also a British Columbia tragedy in which seven people also were killed. It’s on page 14. Do their families feel the loss any less? Will the grieving of their friends be any more diminished? These seven were all tenth-graders at a private school near Calgary, Alberta, and they died fulfilling their dream in Glacier National Park in western Canada. If it weren’t for newspapers, you might not know about this story, for there was no room for these seven on TV. One of the worst aspects of the Columbia story, or any story like it, is the unconscionable reaction by people with microphones and cameras. Yes, we all slow down to see an accident on the freeway, and this is the penultimate rubbernecking event, this or anything like it. But please- -back off. The experts will come to their conclusions eventually. We’ll all get to find out what happened. In the meantime, leave these poor families alone. It’s really too bad that there was an Israeli among the crew. There will probably be celebratory reports on Al Jazeera if there haven’t been already, trying to make some kind of a tie-in. Some Al Terroristah will try to claim that this was the work of one of the great groups working in service to Allah. Don’t believe it. When the Challenger tragedy occurred in January 1986 you may remember, it was on the day that President Reagan was to give The State of The Union Address. He was going to speak to the astronauts via live hook-up to bolster America’s pride and good feelings about itself just at a time when the President was feeling the heat of the Iran-Contra mess. It was too cold at Cape Canaveral for a launch. The Morton Thiokol people had said the “O-rings” would not function properly in the cold- -it was in the 30s in Florida that day. But the decision to launch went ahead over their protests so the Gipper could look good on TV. Revisionist history often leaves out this part of the story, but if you were alive then and paying attention, this is something you will never forget. (If you don’t know Morton Thiokol, do a Google search- -there’s a ton of information.) One of the great moments-to-be of Reagan’s presidency left a black hole in the nation’s space odyssey. Christa McAuliffe, a remarkable woman was the New Hampshire school teacher, selected by the NASA Teacher-In-Space program. And I always had a crush on Judy Resnik. I also remember that January 1967 day when I was still a school kid that Gus Grissom, one of the original seven Mercury Astronauts, and Ed White and Roger Chaffee also died living their dream. We may never know how many have paid the price in other attempts in Russia or China or wherever because we do our coverage live on TV. But it’s that “live-on-TV” aspect of the after-shocks that are the demeaning part of the story. We will continue in space just as we always have, back to the Wright Brothers. We have Atlantis.
We have Discovery. We
will Endeavor. |
