December marks the end of the year, until we get to the last day and we celebrate the start of a new year. Once Thanksgiving is over, everyone starts the big push toward Christmas which is one of the few bright spots in the month. The days get shorter. It’s dark at 4:30 leading to the shortest day of the year on the 21st. It gets colder. It doesn’t have a good image in music and literature. Simon and Garfunkel sing about, “A winter’s day, in deep and dark December, I am alone.” Mr. Sunshine himself, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” It’s unfortunately a time to look back on the year.
We are a divide nation. We just lived through a nasty mid-term election that one side hopes will stop the madness of the other side. We are losing our leadership role in a more complex world. We can’t even agree on what’s true and what’s not. We can’t agree on what is painfully obvious. We just keep waking up to one more mass shooting. It’s become the new normal. Can you remember the last one? Probably not, they all run together. But, we can’t get control of our guns. We’ve seen stronger hurricanes, terrible flooding, melting ice caps, record heat and forest fires. Every expert says we are the cause, and we’re running out of time to change a disasterous course. Yet, we have leaders who won’t believe it.
2018 has been the 50th anniversary of one of the most tumultuous years in American history, 1968. The country felt like it was coming apart. We were at the height of the Vietnam War. There were violent demonstrations, race riots, assassinations, corrupt political leadership. As we came into December of that year, the country was facing four more years of war, and we couldn’t imagine the consequences of the Richard Nixon presidency that was about to begin in the new year.
There was something in that dark December that did draw the country together. We had been pursuing it from the beginning of the decade. We were trying to get to the moon. President Kennedy had set it as a national goal for the new generation of Americans of “…landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” It was something almost everyone supported. We knew the names of the astronauts and watched every new launch as we got closer to the one that would put us on the moon.
Apollo 8 was the second manned Apollo flight. It would get us closer to the moon than ever before. It was launched on December 21, 1968 with Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot Williams Anders. It took 68 hours to reach the moon as the nation watched. They would not land on the moon. They would orbit it 20 times in 10 hours, and for the first time, show us stunning pictures, including the famous Earthrise that shows our planet floating in the vastness of space. On Christmas Eve, the astronauts also did something remarkable. Something that we couldn’t imagine happening today. They read the first ten verses of Genesis from the Bible as they circled the moon and looked back at the Earth.
The nation listened as they started to read, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” They ended with, “And God called the dry land Earth: and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas; and God saw that it was good.” For few short minutes during those few days there was peace and harmony where we all came together and admired what we could accomplish together. We would do well to remember that December moon.
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