Liberation

First of all, Happy Liberation Day, everyone.

The word "liberation" has so many meanings today. For starters, on Guam they say that on 21 July they were liberated from Japanese control and placed back into American control. (I know, right? You ask them this time.) Also, this year being the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon, we as a people were given a break from all the Cold War fear and had cause to be hopeful after all. We as human beings (maybe) stopped looking furtively at each other and became free to all look up together.

Well, I wasn't yet alive back in 1969. So it is with relish that I'm tuning in to We Choose the Moon to hear the audio exchanged between Houston and the Spacecraft. It makes me feel as if I were tuning in to a piece of much older electronic equipment to hear voices coming from more than 200,000 miles away. I'm planning on staying up to get to the tape where Neil Armstrong says, "That's one small step...", then I intend to go out to that section of Marine Corps Drive in Hagat'na to check out (and maybe photograph) the floats and the camps. Will it rain? Nobody knows, man, and that's what makes it exciting.

A random thought came to me as I was driving around today. Has it ever occurred to anyone out there who is a literary type that our preoccupation for aliens starting in the 20th Century could have been a message of hope? What I mean is, if people had to turn to beings from other planets to get aliens, does that mean that we ran out of humans to alienate? That maybe the "Otherness" of every human out there just ran out, and we were ready to see every human being as part of our in-group?

OK, just thinking out loud. Feel free to shoot this down... ^_^ But thanks for reading, at any rate.

Song in my head: The Pussycat Dolls, "I Hate This Part (Right Here)".

All right, now don't bother me. I'm trying to hear what Buzz is saying.