It’s a shame that people missed First Man, because they were too busy being pissed about wanting bragging rights as the country that landed on the moon first. This movie wasn’t about who got there first. Landing on the moon wasn’t kids racing in a school yard. It was so much bigger than that. It was about humanity, at it’s core. It was about the man, not just the mission. The movie was personal, and told the story of a man and a mission. America did land on the moon first, but space exploration is something that has been accomplished by our world and our species. America accomplished that extraordinary feat in the name of our world.
Somewhere along the way, we were entrusted with being the leader of the free world. It wasn’t because that’s what we were. It’s because that was our promise to become. We were to be a country of immigrants, and slaves who would be freed, and asylum seekers, and refugees, and native born people. We would show how a country of countries would be the example of a free and fair nation. We would be the standard, for the world, as to how people can have individual and collective sovereignty. Each person would be inherently equal. Their rights would be unencumbered, insofar as no one person’s will would infringe upon the right of another’s.
This movie, brought us up into the atmosphere where the collective reached new heights, yet also brought us into the heart of family, of life and death, of love and sorrow. It brought to bear, bonds of friendship, community, and a collective bond between people who would seek to accomplish a mission bigger than one person. It would be out of many one. E pluribus unum.
Those who dissed this movie, for not bragging, also miss that this story was not the whole story of our collective country, during this moment in time. This idyllic snapshot did not include all of our people, nor all of our bonds. Just as they judged the movie by it’s preview, they also fail to see beyond the myopic view of what we accomplished. We cannot hope to reach our promise, if we do not see all of our past, as it bears on our current challenges. We will never make good on who we pledged to become, if we do not recognize, that the bonds many of our country’s citizens shared during this golden age of discovery, looked very different. Until we can recognize our collective truth, we cannot realize our overall mission. For us to achieve the next big leap for mankind, we must first see all of human kind. It is the bridge we must cross. We must see each other, and all must be seen.
The paradox of this story, is the notion of what one person is and can be, as well as what people can accomplish in a collective bond. Too many of our country is still busy judging that some people should not form a collective bond, and it is antithetical to our nature as a species. The reasons are never more than superficial. Almost always, they are the color of our skin, skewed and distorted views of another’s beliefs, and they completely miss the point. The bond people can make, has the power and the energy and the fuel to create something more than any single people will ever achieve. The more we can bond together, in commonality and purpose, the more we can be as a whole.
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