I was talking with one of the staff at my parent's compound in Nigeria, a genial man about ten years my senior, who shared my love of motorcycling. He rode a blatty little Honda 150, with which he deftly negotiated the pure mortal terror of Nigerian roads and highways. I was riding a 1973 Honda CB750 at the time, and he'd never ridden a beast capable of exceeding the ton. He and I swapped riding stories with one another.
Eventually, he started plying me with question after question about life in the far-off United States. He wanted to know what it was like to live in America. Where, in the thicket of competing stories he'd heard about us, did the truth lie?
I told him what I could, from my perspective, and then asked him what he thought of us.
"America is a great country," he said. "It is the strongest country ever in the world."
I asked him, then, what he meant by that. Was it our military? Did military power make us strong?
He shook his head.
"No," he said, and then he looked up into the night sky, turning his eyes towards the fat gibbous moon. "You see the moon in the sky?" I affirmed that I did.
"America is so strong that it reached out and touched the moon," he said. Then he extended his wiry arm upwards, reaching with a work-calloused hand as if he were grasping the moon.
"Arm. Strong. You see? That is why America is a great country."
In 1969, when I was six months old, my parents held me up to their television so they could tell me later that I had, in fact, watched humankind step foot on the moon. It was the most important news of the day, back then, because of course it was. Six months prior, the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the moon for the first time...the equivalent to the current Artemis mission...was the most important thing happening to our species, front and center.
Now? Now we are more distracted and distractible. "Eh, we did this once before, fifty years ago," say the folks/algorithms that choose what headlines to pitch at us. "Hardly a lead story." And so it gets buried under the outrage and gossip. It's a loss.
The howling bloody mess of war, the venality of Mammon, and the endless look-at-me demands of preening powerful egos have always been with us. They are not news, not really.
But we can choose what we look at.
I've been checking in on the Artemis mission, listening in to NASA's com-stream as the entire event has unfolded in real time. That information is available to all who wish to engage with it, down to the granular "fixing the toilet" and "figuring out the GoPro" details. Some of it is glorious. Some mundane. Human beings, working together towards a remarkable goal.
We're brushing our fingers across the moon again. In all of it, it's worthy of attention.
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