Aroostook skies: The eternal flame
To the editor:
“We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.” With these words, President John F. Kennedy left us in 1963.
Since that unforgettable day down in Dallas, all of us, as witnesses and survivors, must assess our success or failure in coping with the living challenges of the last 50 or so years on planet Earth. And that includes, I may add, Aroostook County. What could it possibly mean to inhabit this “third rock from the Sun” in the light left us by our 35th President? We may choose to ignore, malign, or dismiss that light, but each late November, there is that same haunting voice reminding us of what once was and what could have been. It is toward that residual challenge that I speak to my community and County.
Are we still willing to carry on within the promise of the “New Frontier”? Realistically, our political and cultural machinery disappointedly co-opted the phrase to the needs of two generations of candidates and influence-seekers. But how can we connect, in the best tradition of Aroostook Skies, Kennedy to the Cosmos? It is, I believe, our obligation to the late President to re-evaluate his stirring oratory into the best and brightest of our current aspirations, both personally as well as collectively.
One of the oft-heard semantic reference points of Kennedy’s Camelot involved the use of the words “freedom” and “liberty” Between 1960-63, Americans were really conscious of freedom and liberty as living, mainspring concepts in our personal and professional dialogue. Perhaps this cultural energy was no more than an ideological defensive against the aggressiveness of international Soviet/Communist infiltration. But for those among us who permitted notions of freedom and liberty to sink deep within our being (I, as a school-age child), they pulsated with hope, dream, and youth of the heart. And may I dare say … love.
Historically and undeniably, America did pioneer the revolutionary concepts of individual freedom and liberty within the context of republican and democratic government. We boldly introduced these concepts into a world dominated by monarchy, religious hierarchy and privilege. Today, in the demise of the Soviet Bloc, we need not rally to the political/cultural mission of our country as we did in the dark sun of thermonuclear doom. What is our excuse, today, in failing to fire the flame? Let us welcome the challenge with the same energy, faith, and devotion that we brought to earlier endeavors. Let the glow of that new flame kindle a holy light around the world.
And yet, Americans still seem on the defensive, but without the cultural and spiritual reassurance of our rightness. We’ve indulged our technological supremacy for, in the most part, personal comforts and misguided emphasis, striving for public power without personal poetry to rescue our selfish ambitions from our better nature. Now we are staid and bored, jaded and anxiously indebted, coping with “just another day in paradise” or to crave, as my young children croon, “moves like Jaggar, moves like Jaggar.”
Perhaps as JFK asserted, “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” But often I sense no one in this generation ever bothered to pick up the torch. The real question is, like some Arthurian Holy Grail, where is the torch? And who will pick it up, despite the risks and proclaim its fire to a darkened world?
And I am not immune to the challenge. In the planetarium, a recent young visitor eagerly raised her hand in inquiry. Tenderly, I called upon the youth, who boldly demanded to know whether I was an “alien?” Initially dumbstruck, I regained my composure to declare: yes, yes I am an alien. (to her immediate satisfaction). And perhaps we are all aliens, planted for a time upon this pale, blue dot — seeking now to recover our true identities with a new light illuminating our extra-terrestrial destinations and dimensions. Or perhaps, better still, after Nov. 22, 1963 we emerged from tragedy, alien to our better natures, scarred by a violation of a love towards a flawed, yet brightly endowed American President.
Space, to paraphrase the President, has no conscience of its own. Whether it be used for good or ill depends upon our civilization, and only if each one of us begins to sincerely examine his or her own attitudes toward peace and life can we help decide whether the next 50 years will see us healed into a thrust upward and toward greatness or experience a slow agonizing retreat and then a perilous descent into war, grief, fear, and death. Death not just of our material bodies, but of our dreams, our ideals, our history and legacy.
The solar system beckons and awaits us as a new venue for knowledge and peace. Removed from the human equation, it stands as a mute, unanimated story of immense yet unfeeling forces and phenomena. The winter stars creep over the eastern horizon. The Big Chill advances. Orion, Taurus, and Gemini apply their starry muscle to our curious gaze for meaning. John F. Kennedy gave initial voice to this great adventure in a modern, technological context. Now, it is up to us. In the final analysis, we must rediscover an ideological impetus for settling the solar system beyond the merely commercial, the competitive, the calculating. When and will you decide to join in that historic effort?
But the leader is gone, vanished instantaneously in the crack of a rifle shot. It remains up to us to decide whether that day down in Dallas killed the 35th President or killed John F. Kennedy.
Larry Berz is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
