GAZETTE COLUMN: DREAMING THINGS THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN by John P. Flannery

Shuttle docked at Internation Space Station

Photo NOT by John Flannery

Yeats wrote, it’s an Irish curse, to dream things that the world has never seen.

President Jack Kennedy dreamed we could go to space and do the other things.

Because of this dream and a devotion to science, we went to the moon.

I was in France driving a BSA motor bike through a small village in late July 1969, and a local work man stopped me on the cobblestone street, waved me down, and asked, “Are you American?”

I said, “Yes,” uncertain of what to expect.

He invited me to this nearby bar restaurant, quite dark inside, except for the tv.  As best I could tell, he told everyone I was an “American.”  Then they brought me closer to the tv to watch a man, an American, Neil Armstrong, placing his foot on the moon.  There were cheers.  I gave rides up and down the street to the boys and girls of the town, and was feted because America put Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

We often hear politicians these days say we can do anything because we put a man on the moon; in truth, we put a dozen men on the moon on 6 flights from earth to the moon.

But we didn’t get to the moon because we wished it. 

It happened because we cared to study math and science, to compete with the Soviets, and to dream that we would do what no one on our planet had ever done, that we had men and women of courage, mostly test pilots, who set out to do what one President dreamed was possible.

Has this nation lost its ability to dream and then to make its dreams come true?

I was in Titusville, Florida on a court case about a week ago. 

This Oceanside town is a rifle shot from where the Shuttle Endeavor lifted off, and I was there the day before it returned from the International Space Station (ISS), on the next to last manned space mission; after that last mission, American astronauts will have to thumb a ride with the Soviets to the ISS.

There’s something impermanent about the look of most Oceanside communities.  That’s part of their attraction.  Titusville is no different.  But Titusville is about to lose some 26,000 jobs because the Endeavor is our next to last launch and we no longer dream of returning to the moon or going to Mars with manned aircraft.

One shop keeper who owns T-bone Designs created a t-shirt, “It’s a disgrace that America won’t launch a man into space.”  He’s right.

Frederick Jackson Turner espoused his “frontier thesis” in 1893.  He argued that what made Americans so egalitarian, democratic, aggressive and innovative was the American frontier, as it continuously moved westward, and had an enriching effect on the American pioneers and thus the American “can-do” character.

Frontiers broke down customs, offered new experiences, and prompted new institutions and activities. 

When we had conquered the last western frontier, the question was, “what was the motor for change that would continue to make America special?” 

President Theodore Roosevelt’s answer was to look to other continents to conquer for the frontier. 

But I prefer Jack Kennedy’s New Frontier, and it wasn’t just his policies, it was that space ships replaced covered wagons.

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