Posted 6 months ago
via hlewisallways
Vivid memory that will never go away. Jan 28, 1986 was my 12th birthday and we were watching the launch on tv in Mrs Treat’s social studies class.
I’m often taken by the universality of this memory, by how many of us—in my generation, at least—have such similar stories, stories that vary only in the small details (I was in kindergarten; Mrs. Wilson’s class).
And the thing that’s so striking for me is how these recollections differ from our society’s other collective and traumatic memories: our parents speak of remembering every last vivid detail of the moment they learned of the death of JFK or King or RFK—and yet in each of these cases the story was already news, their discovery of it that of an event that had already happened. But when we think back to the Challenger we’re remembering a scene in which we’d all gathered around television sets in our classrooms to watch this shuttle launch live—and that’s amazing if you think about it.
What was it about the Challenger that inspired us all to come together to watch it? Was it simply that Christa McAuliffe was the first teacher to go to space? Or rather that NASA still occupied a place in our cultural imagination in a way it no longer seems to?
Further, do we even do this anymore? Do schoolchildren still sit down in front of TVs to follow a Mars lander? Or is there something else that now inspires our nation’s children to dream?
These questions are genuine—not cynical—because I honestly don’t know. I don’t know if there are events beyond televised invasions that can make our entire nation tune its televisions to the same channel at the same time. I don’t know if we live in a world that’s lost its collective wonder and surprise or if it just looks that way to me. I don’t know if it’s simply a matter of growing up and growing older and growing less curious that a world that may well be no less rich and wondrous than it appeared twenty-five years ago can now somehow fail to inspire the same awe it once did. I don’t know if the last two decades of such exponential progress in technology and media have diminished our capacity for amazement. I don’t know if the events that appear to be relevant and representative of our waning cultural curiosity—tonight’s football contest, a Lost season premiere, an Apple keynote—are actually culturally relevant.
I wonder what we dream about anymore. What our new outer space is.
