I’m catching up on email Jaime. May
I republish this in the CES Musings? If so, do I need to cite another place it
was published first?
Herman
From:
oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Jaime R Vergara
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2012
11:55 PM
To: oe@lists.wedgeblade.net
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] NASA
software developer moves on ...
To colleagues related to NASA and its
work, here's a "testimonial" that was in the Opinion column of the Saipan
Tribune a week Tuesday.
The usual caveat to the rest of the
listserv: curious, welcome; not, see you at the next bend.
The earthrise Armstrong
From the USS
Philippine Sea, Astronaut Neil Armstrong of the US Navy, the first man to walk
on the moon, had his cremated remains scattered to the four winds in the
I was still
in my teens, pretending to be an old man, broadcasting a morning political and
social commentary cum music
over one of two the local commercial radios in a Cagayan town. The
program was, "The love and life of old man Jaime" (ti ayat ken biag ni 'tang Jaime). Sometimes
we subbed for the noon newscast and it was then that we learned of the
assassination of the young JFK.
We mention
this because it was the young president that boldly declared his intent to send
a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Armstrong made it on
schedule.
I was in Tar
Heel country, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, when on a freezing Christmas
in a house heated by burning coal in the basement, we watched photos from
Apollo 8 three years before Armstrong's historic walk on Apollo 11. The
blue orb in the sky rose to the shutter click of a camera hovering over the
moon, taking an image usually seen on earth of the moon or the sun emerging up
to the earth's horizon. In a twist on metaphor, a term and an iconic
picture were born, the "earthrise", unarguably the most potent
mythical symbol of the 20th century.
There it was,
this little planet with only the land and water boundaries visible to the eye,
unmindful of the imaginary political delineations that humans have constructed
through the centuries to separate parcels of territories into nations.
There were just the continents and the water, exposing the reality that the
separation of nations, areas, and regions are human constructs that can be
deconstructed. Nations have taken lives of their own, imposed on
territories for the sake of powerful vested interests.
Suddenly, our
The Limits of Growth report from the Club
of Rome was still four years away to notoriety, but the viciousness we were
showing in dealing with the racial divide, and the devastation we were visiting
on an impoverished country proud enough to say "Non" to their Gaelic colonizers and
determined not to be under the imposition of a foreign rule again, was just
unconscionable.
It was then,
in a feat of youthful idealism, and prophetic realism, that we chose the
"earthrise" to be our home. A radical transformation occurred
that took us from a peasant boy of the northern
The picture
of the earthrise has since graced our living space, externally and
internally. As part of my introduction, and the students are likewise
asked to introduce themselves using the guide questions of what, when, where,
who, how, and why, I begin by claiming the earth as my hometown, and there is
no place in it where I am a stranger. In my glocal being, I have
appropriated a native-ness to every piece and parcel of it, animate and
inanimate. The mantra in our young adulthood still prevails: All the goods of the Earth belong to all the
people. All the decisions of history belong to all the people. All
the inventions of humanness belong to all the people.
We might have
ceased actively in the sloganeering part as the focus has been at the point
where the rubber hits the road. Being a glocal citizen in a deeply rooted
ethnocentric culture like
It has been a
passage of spectacular proportions and deep currents in the incursion, emptying
the pocket book in the excursion but enriching to no end the dB of the
experience. Still, the expedition ain't over yet, and thanks to Neil
Armstrong ("one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind") and
the Apollo mission crew, this country boy of the Malay race is managing to join
the great leap forward of humankind.
j'aime la vie
-----Original
Message-----
From: Tim Wegner <twegner@swbell.net>
To:
Sent: Sun, Sep 30, 2012 10:39 am
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] NASA software developer moves on ...
Ruth wrote: > I'm glad to know that a colleague was involved > with the space shuttle program! There were at least three at NASA - Larry Henscen (space station design)Lynn Oden (shuttle navigation flight controller)Tim Wegner (shuttle navigation software developer) Tim_______________________________________________OE mailing listOE@lists.wedgeblade.nethttp://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net