Thoughts on Today’s Tragedy
I was hurled into the strangest sense of deja vu this morning when I turned on the television. First of all, I was mentally steeling myself for an hour of kiddie-fare, as it was time for Blues Clues and Dora the Explorer, without which my sons’ week is not complete. So to get, not Joe and Blue, but Dan Rather solemnly intoning that something had gone wrong with the space shuttle landing was disconcerting. And it was spooky because, just yesterday, I was rearranging my bookshelves and I came across two scrapbook albums I made of news coverage of the Challenger disaster. The scrapbooks were hard to look at, but when the network played video footage of today’s explosion, I was hurled backward in time to 1986. I wonder how many other people had that same feeling?
I was a high school junior and had been fascinated by the space program since the day I learned that I was born one month before man walked on the moon. I had followed the shuttle program avidly, and I wanted to be like Christa McAuliffe. I was watching Challenger’s launch while getting ready for school. When Challenger exploded, something in me did, too. I remember bursting into tears. It was a turning point for me in a number of ways.
I think that was the first time I was ever gripped by the horrified fascination that makes you watch something ghastly even while your mind is telling you not to look because it’s too awful. It was also the moment when the complete uncertainty of life hit me full force. Most people don’t gain that insight until they are in their 20s or 30s. I got it at 17. It was the moment that I first comprehended the true compassion of the statement “It was so fast that they didn’t know anything.” And the horrible helpless feeling of “There’s nothing we can do to stop this.”
And so many of those feelings hit me again this morning.
- All the poor people at NASA: “Something’s wrong; there’s nothing we can do.”
- The only consolation for the families: “It happened so fast that they didn’t know a thing.”
- The incredible courage of the President, when he had to say those horrible, fateful words: “Columbia is lost. There are no survivors.”
- And the awful realization that they were only 15 minutes from home. How short and uncertain life is. How helpless we are.
And I wondered, too, about reaction around the world. Here’s Israel’s first astronaut, a national hero, on his first mission, and now he’s gone. How will that affect our relations with Israel? How are the Palestinians and the Arabs handling this news? Will this endanger our relations with the nations participating in the International Space Station project? How will this affect the crew that is in the ISS? Is there a Luddite somewhere who thinks that this serves us right for meddling where we have no call to be? Will this affect the number of applicants to the space program?
That last question was answered for me this afternoon. I gave both my sons some astronaut toys for Christmas: a space shuttle, a 3-stage rocket, a moon rover, and a bunch of little army-man-style astronauts. My firstborn said, “I’d like to be an astronaut and go to the moon!” But this afternoon, when he saw the news coverage and I explained that some astronauts had died when their spaceship blew up today, he said “Maybe I won’t be an astronaut after all. I don’t want to blow up.”
That was when I finally cried.
3 Comments
Such a loss. 16 years ago, I was in Haight Ashbury when I saw a newspaper’s headlines screaming about the Challenger disaster. My mind couldn’t process the information… I thought it had to be a joke. It wasn’t until I turned on the news that evening that I realized it was true. So sorry that it has happened again.
Nice article. I purposely did not write about the tragedy yesterday thinking the network would be full of reflections. Instead, I see very little. Your comments are by far the best written. Kudos and thank you for sharing.
Odd reality
We walked in for lunch at a San Francisco cafe. While we were waiting for them to set up our table, I spied a pile of newspapers left behind by a diner. The headline was so very odd to see — I instinctively assumed the headline was referring to the previous Shuttle disaster. So I kept trying to look for the name/picture of the teacher who’d been on board that flight. But she didn’t seem to be there.
The strangest aspect was that there was no timeline on the front page…I kept scanning the different stories trying to make sense of the SF Chronicle coverage and could not place the accident. It was the worst reporting I’ve seen in that there was all this “color” commentary (debris landing near a chicken coop, and what have you) about the disaster but no facts about when (what time, what day) it had happend. That was buried inside.
As my friend commented, strange that one didn’t even know that there was a Shuttle coming back to earth. We’ve gotten so blase about it. Space travel? Oh yeah, even that NSync goofball’s about to go for it! And even stranger, he commented, was the fact that we spent all day yesterday…at brunch with friends, walking around Union Square, and eating dinner at Home Restaurant, and we saw many TV screens, their sound turned off, their pictures tuned to sports and music videos et al, but no mention of this breaking news.
Very, very odd that in this day of over-connectedness we could miss news like this for 36 hours while being out and about in a major metropolitan city.