This video suggests a lot of interesting things, not least of which is that we have a sort of generic response to out of the ordinary events. Are the election of the first black president and the first moon landing of equal significance? I mean, both are of immense importance, and it would be hard to say if one was a greater achievement than the other. My point is, however, that public sentiment in regard to these two events are indistinguishable, and that says a lot about who we are as a people. On the one hand we achieved a great technological feat which has inspired generations since and may very well shape the future; on the other hand we have a great leap toward the progress of not just civil liberty, but toward a world of equality and peace. Both represent a triumph over ignorance, but one is more or less a novelty while the other is refutation of a collective human legacy of history of violence and intolerance. Penicillin was an achievement. The cotton gin was a achievement. So were the invention of the assembly line, the internal combustion engine, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor. So was gunpowder and the atomic bomb. So what defines an event as important? Something which changes the world? Or something that changes the world for the better? Do we still possess the ability to recognize what is important? In this world tens of millions of people alive today will die of AIDS. For the first time in history we have enough food to feed every person in the world, enough to feed them twice over, but a person still dies of starvation every four seconds because he didn't have enough money to BUY any of our surplus of food and so it's feed to chickens and cows instead. It's a big fucking deal we walked on the moon. More so that we're shedding our ancestral racism. Why do these things merit trumpets and news specials, when the majority of Americans couldn't tell you the death toll of the Rwandan genocide. We lack, as a people, a realistic perspective. It's like playing golf in a cemetery. It's like Pepto-Bismal for our conscience.

Seriously though. How much would it suck to be Michael Collins?

The moon landing which actually happened.

Because anyone who thinks otherwise is exceptionally crazy.