1969 was the year of Woodstock, Led Zeppelin’s first album, the Boeing 747’s inaugural flight, the election of Israel’s first female Prime Minister (Golda Meir), the Beatles final live performance (an impromptu concert on the roof of Apple Records, which was broken up by police), the first confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America (and it took the life of  a teenager, Robert R.), the beginning of the US gay rights movement (sparked by the Stonewall riots in NY City), the first withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, the killing of two Black Panther Party Members (who were asleep at the time) during a Chicago police officers’ raid, and many more notable stories and events.

But it is an event on July 20th, 1969, that I recall without consulting Wikipedia or other historic information sites. I was on summer holidays — between grades six and seven — watching the first human step onto the moon. It was almost unimaginable, and the fact that I watched the event on our grainy black-and-white TV made it all the more surreal. It was an achievement that stunned me, and changed me; an event that ignited my imagination and altered my reading preference to science fiction. I wanted to be an astronaut (at one point I even sent an application to NASA; sadly, I never received a reply). Above all it was an event that made me realize how small I was in relation to the universe.

Photo by NASA/NewsmakersThe three men who manned the first moon-mission are locked in my memory: Michael Collins (surely, for several moments, the loneliest man ever: he was off of his home planet and on the other side of the moon; no visual contact with Earth, nobody for company, and nothing but static to listen to — see Of a Fire on the Moon, by Norman Mailer for more details); Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the Moon’s surface; and last, but not least, the mission Commander, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to set foot on another celestial body.

I’m sure everyone has heard by now that Neil Armstrong passed away on Saturday, a little over forty-three years since his historic accomplishment. It is a sad day, but a good day to reflect on a positive accomplishment of the human spirit (interestingly, Neil Armstrong’s famous quote, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” was, he said, slightly misquoted: what he actually said was, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”).

Those first astronauts left a plaque on the moon that states: “We came in peace for all Mankind.” And during Armstrong’s first walk on the surface, he paused and put a patch on the surface to commemorate the Soviet cosmonauts and NASA astronauts who had died performing their duties. These acts took place during the Cold War, and were lovely gestures. The words on the plaque were encouraging, but human strife between antagonists continues to this day.

Someday, a human will place a plaque on Mars to commemorate the further adventures of humankind. It would be wonderful if we could learn to embody peace as a species while we continue our voyage of discovery.

.

.

.