When it comes to childhood moments viewed on television that define a generation, my parents had the crew of Apollo 11 and their historic moon landing, enshrined in history by Neil Armstrong’s, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And while Armstrong, amid a sleep-deprived haze, life-or-death tension and possibly the world’s most warranted case of stage fright ever, may have flubbed his line a little, the malapropism still hung so true that billions of people have been willing to overlook the fact that the words “don’t make no kinda sense.”

He did better than most of us would have. I’d have probably blurted out, “Holy shit guys, does this look as cool as it feels?”

For that matter, Armstrong could have sang “la Cucaracha” for all most people watching would have cared. The historic significance of the moment would have been just as great. In the span of a century, mankind had gone from holding wacky superstitions about the moon, from fearing it, from believing it was made of cheese, to developing the technology to keep people alive on a 225-thousand-mile journey through hard vacuum, and then doing it!

In those early days of the Apollo program, there was little purely scientific value to sending a man to the moon beyond a very strong I-told-you-so factor. Armstrong out there strutting his stuff among the moon rocks and dust was the ultimate testament to the bad-ass, can-do enthusiasm of the human race, a triumph of the grit and borderline reckless determination that props up all great discoveries and achievements. 

My parents had the crew of Apollo 11 and their historic moon landing, which tied them together as a shared experience through television. My generation had six hours of police chasing a white Ford Bronco, and all of the wretched circus that followed.

My generation got hosed.

I’m the first to admit that I’ve always had a soft spot for the space program. Though I’ve never had much patience for numbers myself, I respect the hell out of anyone with enough command over that damn things to put a plane in the air or build a bridge or cure diseases or put a man on the moon. Pure science fascinates me, as long as somebody else is doing it.

NASA had its critics, even in its heyday, who balked at the hefty price tag of three men’s trip to the lunar surface and back (Neil Armstrong you know, Buzz Aldrin you’ve probably heard of, and Mike Collins never got to land on the surface of the moon. He had the thankless job of keeping the home fires burning in the Command Module while the other two frolicked around Tranquility Base. I would trade all my worldly possessions and 10 years of my life for his “thankless job”), just as the program has its critics now.

Just as it was then, we’re a nation at war, but not really at war. These are dark times, as they were back then. We have important national priorities — health care reform, education, the economy — that require urgent attention and effort.

I maintain, and I will always maintain, that putting a human being back on the moon, and then taking that can-do attitude further should be among those priorities. It should always be among those priorities. Because while we’re toiling away to once again pull this country back from the brink of disaster, it would be nice to know that someone, somewhere out in this human condition, is doing something stupendously great just for the sake of saying we did.

We’re human beings. It’s in our nature to pursue what’s over that next horizon. When we’re not boldly going where no man has gone before, to paraphrase a great, albeit fictional man, we’re just spinning our wheels.

And that, an entire society just spinning its wheels, is as much to blame for the great spiritual malaise that has beset our world as anything else.