When I was a little kid, the school system was really into this thing of promoting the space program. And not just the school. Society had a love thing with space and NASA and all of its various parts. During the afternoons, we would watch reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, which seemed to be about a magical creature trying to take the virtue of some astronaut. We would be given information about the space program. They did space camp. They even made a movie about space camp.
The most common thing though was that whenever a shuttle would take off, we would watch it on TV. And if that was during school time, classes would stop so we could all watch. It was important. They would usher us all into the library or wheel those televisions on carts into the room.
So on this date, when I was in sixth grade, everyone was pulled out of class so they could watch the space shuttle Challenger. Even for a shuttle launch, this was a BIG DEAL, because this one had a grade school teacher on it. Her name was Christa McAuliffe and she was part of the Teacher in Space Program. Out of all the teachers nominated for the program, she'd won. She was on the news all the time. We were sent posters of her and stories. Every child in America knew this woman.
We watched as the ship took off . . . and we watched as it exploded.
If anyone ever asks me, as they sometimes do, what the HELL is wrong with Gen X, I will always tell them this story. I might add some details later about screwed up parents and the summer we all watched Tiananmen Square, but the kick off was here. This. This explosion.
Well, in a way, it was this explosion. That is the outward cause of what made us....well, US. Watching people die in live action was rough. Especially when we'd had that vast set up for the whole thing.
But what really destroyed us was how the adults reacted.
See, when it comes down to it. It's not OUR generation that had this magical love affair with the space program. It was the people who were teaching us, bringing the nightly news, our parents. After all they had lost during the years before, watching Kennedies get assassinated and Vietnam and all of their innocence washed away in violent demonstrations, the space program was something they still BELIEVED in. It was their hope and their promise.
This was why they took us out of classes to watch the launches. This is why a teacher going into space was such a big thing. It continued their dream that anyone could do this. The space program, for many of the Boomer Generation, was their last stand for hope . . . and it exploded in the faces of their children.
They didn't know how to talk to us. They didn't know what to tell us. As we sat there, as children, trying to make sense of this horrible thing that happened, the adults around us were just as broken as we were about it. They were too broken and too shocked to hide it from us. We saw this and we understood their vulnerability. We knew that deep down, they were only marginally more equipped to handle these things than we were.
We suddenly felt alone, naked. Orphaned. We were orphaned because they were.
That is what I remember about the Challenger explosion. Not just watching as everything exploded, but watching as all the adults around me suddenly looked at once older and so much younger. I remember watching them walk around in a daze, all having lost the one last bit of their own childhood.
I wasn't shocked when people stopped talking about space. I wasn't surprised when we didn't watch launches anymore or how no one even acted like it was something they wanted to do. Past that point, the vast majority of people pretended like the space program didn't even exist any more, like all of it had just been some expensive pipe dream that more or less proved nothing.
They still send people into space now. Mostly though, we hear about them in passing. If they talk about space at all, it's mostly robots or other less breakable things. That's safer, less meaty, easier to accept if something goes wrong. Not that, really, if something went wrong it would be like it was on that day.
As much as Ernest Hemmingway and his fellows felt themselves the Lost Generation, I think he would have been rather shocked at how deeply the ennui set in for us. And as things fall apart and build back up, when buildings are broken or cities flooded or any number of other tragedies are seen, we feel them, but never with the deep shock felt by other generations. On some level, we're always prepared for that slap in the dark, for the moment when the dog bites us, for when the pretty flying ship suddenly lights on fire and all the adults around us go poof.
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