40 Years Ago Today, All Earth Stood Still

If you are old enough to recall 1968 you remember that by the time we reached Christmas Eve, we almost were relieved the year was staggering to an end.

It was the year we came apart. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been shattering. It had been a year of protests on college campuses, culminating at the Democratic Convention in Chicago where the police had lost control as they attacked protesters in Grant Park.

The war in Vietnam was creating a breach in the American psyche that was coming on top of a year of racial disturbances, as the struggle for civil rights for all also had moved to the streets.

The Cold War in Europe had gotten hotter as the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, brutally putting an end to an attempt by the Czechs to open up their society.

In Tampa we still were recovering from race riots a year earlier. The schools were in turmoil over a teachers strike, and the institutions that held the country together were being challenged at every level.

The Good Old Z of I

In 1968 I came back to the Zone of the Interior, as the Air Force so fondly referred to the continental United States, after three years overseas away from home.

I had changed, but not as much as the country. There seemed to be a disconnect, especially between generations. I enrolled at the University of South Florida, but, to be honest, the whole process seemed irrelevant, which is my excuse for a grade-point average that barely registered a pulse.

The war in Southeast Asia that was tearing the country apart didn't seem as important on the campus as the Frisbee tossing next to the outdoor pool by the dorms.

And then, on Dec. 21, NASA launched Apollo 8, a mission that would, for the first time, take man beyond the Earth's gravitational pull and eventually carry him to the dark side of the moon and back.

All Of You On The Good Earth

Three days later, exactly 40 years ago tonight, as the Apollo crew went around the moon, they read from the first 10 verses of Genesis as a worldwide crowd estimated at more than a billion people watched. In turn, astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and Jim Lovell read, concluding with "Merry Christmas - and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

It was one of those moments. And I suspect that for a lot of us, there was for the first time the realization of just how closely bound we are on this planet.

It was that same flight that gave us the great photo of "Earthrise," as our blue and white planet, looking so fragile out in the emptiness of space, rose over the barren moonscape.

Four decades later there is that same sense of drifting and coming apart. And once again the enemy is just as much within as without, as confidence in our institutions and leadership is extremely low.

We could use another coming together tonight, even if it is just a small group of family and friends sitting around and reading those ancient texts.