Author Archives: bpriddy

Original Thinking

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(In the cartoons, it’s a light bulb that comes on over the head of the character—the bright idea, suddenly arriving.  Did Thomas Edison have a light bulb come on over his head when he finally perfected the light bulb?  All of us have had those sudden thoughts.  But we don’t think about them. From where did they come?  What inspired them?  Dr. Crane returns after a week off to offer some thoughts about thinking)

IDEAS OF A PLAIN MAN—I

“The thought that comes to you,” says a French writer, “has arrived in your mind after a long voyage through space and time, longer than the last of stars is distant from your eyes.”

Everyone has been startled to find, upon opening some book of old ideas that Augustine or Plutarch or Zeno, that some idea he had fancied to be his own, private, and as yet unuttered,  leap out and laugh at him. It gives one a queer turn.  Am I them but a Thought-Inn, a lodging for the night, wherein perceptions, old and indestructible…come and abide? To think is to plagiarize!

About the only original thinking in any of us is that hazy, not understandable, yet most vitally real thing that we call Personality. When Shakespeare or Browning write, they are but restating world-old things, but the things acquire a Shakespeare taste, a Browning flavor.

Even the words of Jesus, many of them, may be traced to this or that source: His sentiments and commandments may be picked up here and there in eastern literature; the intensely original element in him was his rare and wonderful Personality. His enduring miracle was Himself.

Thoughts are Ancient Vagrants. The New things on this worn out old stone are you and I, souls little flames of God, sparks from the central Sun of Life.

Tell the truth, pay a fine

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We never say, “Well, I’ve seen it all now” because there’s always somebody in the wings just waiting with something more outrageous than what we’ve seen.

And one of the latest in an increasingly growing number of outrageous characters in our political system is this bird:

Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock has introduced a bill requiring all of those who check politicians’ statements for truthfulness to register with the state and file proof of a $1,000,000 fidelity bond.  The Detroit News reports fact checkers who don’t register could be fined $1,000 per day they are not registered. The bill also says an “affected person” could file a civil action claiming the bond for “any wrongful conduct that is a violation of the laws of the state.”  Maddock says a judge could order the bond forfeited “for demonstrable harm” stemming from something the fact-checker wrote and said.

The Washington Post says Maddock, a Republican, is married to the co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

Maddock was one of those last year who tried to impeach Governor Gretchen Whitmer because of her restrictions intended to control the coronavirus.  He joined a federal lawsuit in December challenging President Biden’s election.

Even more outlandish is that he has eight co-sponsors.

Maddock seems to resent people such as CNN’s Daniel Dale and organizations such as Politifact, Factcheck.org, Snopes, NPR Fact-Check, and the Washington Post and its famed system of awarding Pinocchios to those telling who have a problem with the truth.

Dale told colleagues Brianna Keilar and John Berman that Maddock is “scoring points with the conservative base by going after the media.”   He said it also shows “the growing disrespect for the principle of a free press, for the First Amendment, throughout certain segments of the Republican party, not just the base but elected officials.”

We note that fact-checkers have pounced on some of the things President Biden has said although his record for mendacity is miniscule compared to that of his predecessor.

The scary thing about Maddock is that there is a segment of the population that is cheering him on.  Truth be damned.  The public has no right to know when someone in government lies.

While Maddock wants to target people such as Dale and others, his legislation could apply to every reporter for every news organization because it’s the job of every reporter to challenge lies and misstatements.  People such as Maddock don’t want their “alternate facts” exposed for what they are.

Thank God for the First Amendment.  Maddock and his ilk prefer to ignore it; we won’t hazard a guess whether they’d like to cancel it.

In times like these, when truth is so blatantly ignored by those who seek power and control over our freedoms, when those who speak the truth are punished by their own political party that seems afraid to challenge its greatest liar, fact-checkers are ever more crucial.

And legislation such as that proposed by Maddock should be seen as a threat to the freedoms of all of us. His kind cannot prevail.

 

It’s about time

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The capitol started to cool at 6 p.m. last Friday, the official adjournment time of the 2021 regular session of the legislature.

Actually, as we understand it, the heat and the hard pulse of the building began to diminish at mid-afternoon when the Senate adjourned, deadlocked in an intra-party fight about the most notorious bill-killer issue for the last twenty or thirty years—abortion.

Tack some language on a bill that forbids any funding for any program that involved anyone who might say or think “birth control” and that bill goes to the grave’s edge with one foot on a banana peel.

That’s what took whatever wind was left in the sails of this session out of those sails.  Unfortunately, the effort this time was tied to a bill that continues a tax on hospitals—that are willing to be taxed—so more federal money is available to provide healthcare to poor people. Democrats let it be known the birth control amendment wouldn’t fly, especially after the Republicans refused to find funding for the expanded Medicaid program voters put into the Missouri Constitution last year. The Democrat leader moved to adjourn early and although the R’s had more than enough votes to defeat the D’s motion, it passed, leaving the House the only chamber still in business. The House, to its credit, slogged on despite expressions of urinary agitation toward the Senate.

It’s about time—-too little time to iron out problems assuming anybody wanted to do any ironing.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that one chamber or another has quit early for one reason or another.

On the other hand, “it’s about time” has another and more positive meaning.

It’s about time the legislature approved a fuel tax increase that does not require a public vote.  The refusal of voter twice to support increases has left our transportation system in desperate straits and this observer thinks our lawmakers deserve a friendly pat for doing what had to be done—-although it should have been done years ago.

But discussing what should have been done has little value. What has been done is what’s important today.  Now.  My car is grateful and so am I.

It’s also about time the legislature finally decided state sales taxes should be collected on internet sales.  Again, it’s something that should have been done years ago but this year, it got done. Will it keep local stores trying to compete with internet super-super-super stores from closing?  In reality, not many probably.  But it’s nice to see the legislature get past the idea that having people pay sales taxes they should be paying is some kind of an onerous tax increase.

But there seems to be some kind of a tiny irony here.  Missouri will start collecting taxes on internet sales of things that lead to birth control.

We’re mulling what seems to be a logic disconnect in that but we haven’t figured it out yet.

To an Athlete Playing Old

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In my mind, I still think I could play third base, could field the one-hopper, hop-step and throw the bullet to first base to get the runner by a step.  In my mind, it’s me and the pitcher, one-on-one and I feel rather than hear the bat strike the ball and I hear the wind whip past my ears as I sprint to first base. I smell the dust.  I hear the voices from my dugout. I know my skin, by the end of the game, will have a light coating of mud—dust mixed with the sweat of sweet effort.

In my mind.

It has been fifteen years since I put the supple black glove in the green bag at the end of a game —I played third in a co-ed game and threw out a runner trying to score on one of those one-hoppers, the ball going over his shoulder perfectly to the catcher who forced him out at home in a bases-loaded situation.  My spiked shoes are in the bag, too, although the soles have pulled away from the tops because dozens of nights of game-sweat eventually rotted the stitching.

I say it was my “most recent game,” not my “last game.”

I know the love of playing the game, a changing game as skills eroded, from that first season of baseball as an 8-year old batter terrified of a 10-year old pitcher (I summoned the courage to swing at a pitch in my last game and singled past the undoubtedly stunned pitcher), to fast-pitch softball, and finally (when fast-pitch disappeared and too many young men found it easier to impress the girlfriends by mashing looper league pitches over fences) slow pitch softball.

It was, and is, the game.  Playing the game in whatever form talent and circumstance allowed.

Many of us now slow of foot, thick of waist, driven by delusions of adequacy, understand when a young—by our standards—major league star finds the game is beyond his competitive capabilities. Or is told the game is now beyond their once-awsome abilities.

NO, we cry.  No!  We can still play!  I can still do this!

But at 60 or 70 or 80, it is easier to admit that no, we really can’t.  Or shouldn’t.  But we will remember.  And we will wish.

It is much worse when you are but 40.

We look at players such as Albert Pujols, old at 41, hanging on or wanting to hang on because the game has a grip on him more than he still has a grip on the game.

It comes to all athletes in all sports.  But for those at the highest levels, the realization can be agonizingly hard to accept.  I can get one more home run. I can strike out one more batter. I can throw one more touchdown.  I can hit one more buzzer-beater.

But others can do more while I’m striving for my one-more. I can be pushed aside.

Most of us common folks who hold regular jobs have the luxury of deciding there are too many other things to do in life than go to the workplace every day. Stepping away is easier, sometimes just plain joyous.

We never have to face the idea that we are 40 and there no longer is a place for us in the world that has been the consuming passion of our lives—all our lives.

The passion is there.  The fire of competition still rages within. But in a world that relies on physical skills, recognizing that ours no longer match our passion enough to stay in the competitive arena is so hard to accept.

As fans of sport, we do not measure our heroes by their age and when we think they are done when they are “only” 40, we realize these heroes are not ageless but are as human as we are—although we don’t have to realize we are old until we are old.

Moments such as these recall for us English Edwardian poet A. E. Housman’s elegy for a young athlete who died before he joined the great mass of those who faded into obscurity as their skills waned. He called it “To An Athlete Dying Young.”

The time you won your town the race, We chaired you through the market place;  Man and boy stood cheering by And home we brought you shoulder high.

The poem later speaks of “the road all runners come,” and “fields where glory does not stay, and early though the laurel grows, it withers quicker than the rose.”

Such is the life of our heroes of the playing field.

We who watch them might realize before they do that “glory does not stay.”  That time comes for all of us but usually not when we are just forty and have spent our lives among an elite few who can do what they have been doing. We sometimes say goodbye to them before they can bring themselves to say goodbye to the world that has consumed their lives.

It is much harder to step aside when you are 40 and a 25-year-old is doing what you only think you can still do, than it is when you are 65 and realize there is something liberating ahead.

Another English poet, from one generation earlier than Housman’s, wrote, “The last of life, for which the first was made…youth shows but half; Trust god: See all, nor be afraid.”

In time the resistance to Robert Browning’s sentiment will diminish.  But it is hard to accept when you are an athlete playing old.

Legacy

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It’s all down to these last three days.

The human business of writing laws is about done for this year, at least in a regular legislative session.  Four months ago these ladies and gentlemen (at least in the house) and senators (in the senate everybody is a senator, as the ages-old saying goes; there are no ladies and gentlemen),  trouped to chilly, gray Jefferson City, many of them fresh off their first election to the most important office they’d ever been chosen to hold and some back for the second half of a term of the highest office they had ever held. Or ever would.

Now, probably tired and long-shorn of the freshness of January, they look at 6 p.m. Friday, some with wishes they could have done more and some glad that the legislature did not do more.  The record of this session by and large has been compiled.

A key question that should occur to all who have sat at their desks in those great chambers as they look back on what the record of this General Assembly will be is, “Did we defend and improve the welfare of the people of Missouri?”  For that is the main job of government.

There will be lists of bills compiled and circulated, the wording coldly descriptive.  But behind the unemotional language, how are the people better off for all the words spoken, all the words written and all the words re-written?

Each lawmaker will have his or her answer to the question that best suits their purpose and their self-image.

One of the shortcomings of our Capitol is that it has large composite photographs of members of the House and Senate for each legislative session.  But there are no accompanying signs that tell passersby what issues those people discussed, fought over, passed and rejected. Each session has a legacy but anyone pausing to look at the forgotten faces of past sessions will never know it.

In some cases, it’s best that those pictures are without written context.  Would the results of any session be different if lawmakers knew there would be a sign next to their pictures for generations to come detailing what they did—or didn’t do—or refused to do—for the people?

Even without a sign, what has happened this year that these folks will be proud to tell their grandchildren about?  Or proud to have mentioned in the last newspaper article that will ever be written about them?

The final words of the legacy of the 2021 session will be written in these last three days.

 

 

Back to the grind

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(Another Monday.  Back to the old job. Again.  For some, today is the first of five days at the old grind.  For others, it’s the beginning of five days of excitement, of opportunity.  For some today just starts a work week. For others it’s another day to fulfill a calling—and the approach is completely different. Dr. Crane might have written this for those who go forth on Mondays, as he considers—-)

THE JOY OF WORK

If you examine carefully all of the supposed joys of life you will find the most enduring, satisfactory and real joy is work.

But to be joyful, work must be the kind you like.

And work, to be liked, must have two elements.

First, it must call into play one’s full, normal activities.

And second, it must be the creating of something.

The truest happiness is found in the most complete exercise of our powers.

Children are happy because they are doing with all their might everything they can do. Arms, legs, lungs, are busy every waking moment.

Laziness, drunkenness, sensuality are diseases that come on later in life. Those that indulge in are happy only by fevered spells. Between these they are consumed by restlessness, doubt, ennui, and despair.

The great mass of men are happy most of the time because they have their necessary work. And where a man finds his right work it is the same to him that play is to a child.

Look at this busy humanity, doctors and lawyers, farmers, merchants and clerks, letter carriers, engineers, masons, carpenters, writers and house mothers!  Out of them, as a mighty chorus, arises the hymn of “The joy lf living.”

Life is pleasant because it is functioning normally.

Life is a burden only when it ceases to function.

Every faculty cries for something to do. The brain must think, plan, organize, project, imagine, reason, compare, decide.

When it has no real business upon which to use these motions, we load it with artificial concerns, such as novels, plays, and travel sites, to sill its clamor and craving. But the people who are amusing their brains are not so happy as those who are using their brains.

It is better to play at work than to work at play.

The muscles demand something to do. When we refuse them, they breed poison in us. They curse us with gout and rheumatism, and biliousness.

The stomach, liver, heart, and lungs all demand steady employment. Give us work, they shout, or we will go on strike. They are more cantankerous than a labor union when they are refused employment.

The eye wants work. We must have someone to love, someone to revere, something to suffer and to overcome.

Tannhauser grew weary in the lap of Venus; he longed for human strife and sorrow.

And a perfect hell would be a place where every sense is lulled, every appetite is gorged, where there is eternal rest and nothing forever and ever to do.

Joy is a function of activity.

Soul and body pray for dangers, crises, tasks.

Perfect joy circles as a halo the brow of the worker and the fighter.

“To him that overcometh will I give the morning star.”

 

The Constitution and the vaccine: and the danger of selfish people

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Drew Vogel was one of my early reporters at the Missourinet.  He has had a lengthy career as a nursing home administrator in Ohio and since his retirement from a fulltime directorship has held several interim positions.

There’s a special place in my heart for people who work in nursing homes.  And for those who have been working in the industry during this COVID era, well, I’m not sure I can measure the depth of my admiration. Drew has a blog, too, and last week he let off some steam about people who think it is their constitutional right to refuse vaccinations and put others at risk.

Drew has been on the front lines in the fight against disease.  And we all know that THE front lines have been our nursing home.

He doesn’t mince words about vaccinations and the selfish use by some of the Constitution to avoid the responsibility all of us have to each other.  Listen to this good man.

I have just ended an interim (temporary) assignment as administrator at a nursing home Near Dayton, Ohio.  I have done, without bothering to count them up, something like 13 interim assignments the past seven years.

 I joke that interim work is great because you don’t stay around long enough to get fired!

 In reality, I am lucky enough that I don’t need to work a permanent fulltime job.  But I do need to work – especially since my wife passed away last September.  Work is good for my psyche, my emotions – good for my soul. There is a dignity element also – although no one has ever accused me of being very dignified.

 This recent building was one of my best interim assignments.  The staff was great, hard-working, friendly and fun.  I feel like in those 3+ months I made some friends for life.

 The guys were very positive in their approach to long-term care, in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they had been through some adversity.

 The facility was COVID-free in the early stages of the pandemic last year until around Thanksgiving. Then there was a major outbreak.

 Ultimately, 75-100 total people – staff and residents – contracted the disease.  By the end of the year about 15 residents had died.  No staff died, but some got very sick.

 When I arrived in January two employees were off sick with the coronavirus, but the outbreak was pretty much under control. Temperature checks, questionnaires and masks were required to get in the door.  Only people with a purpose could come in. Vendors dropped their goods outside – food, oxygen, supplies – and the staff dragged them inside.

 When visitation resumed, visitors were first tested, masked and confined to a room that did not require entry into the building proper.

 In January, the first week I was at the facility, I received my first vaccination shot – Pfizer – and in February I got the follow up injection.  I was happy to receive it.

 However, even though it was free and had been proven to work, not everyone took the vaccine. 

 It is voluntary almost everywhere in America. In my facility some staff and some residents – or their families – said NO!

 The month of March went pretty well.  Then in April, over a couple weeks’ time, a housekeeper, a cook and a therapist tested positive and were sent home to quarantine. 

 Yesterday, my last day, a nursing assistant tested positive – with symptoms.

 The COVID-19 protocol was immediately initiated.  A text was sent to all staff to come in immediately to be tested; all residents were swabbed.

 As of when I left yesterday afternoon, two more cases had been discovered – both residents.  There may be more by now.

 Six cases in April and NONE OF THEM HAD BEEN VACCINATED! 

 No cases in April among people who had been vaccinated – people working side-by-side in exactly the same confines as the people who developed COVID-19.

 As the saying goes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist ……………..

 I’ve always believed our Constitution is the world’s greatest document – at least the greatest created by a government.  It contains enumerable individual rights.  But those rights cease at the point they infringe upon the rights of others – like the right not to die because of another’s misconceptions, fear and/or puffed-up ego.

 In other words, I am an advocate of MANDATORY vaccines.  Don’t give people a choice.

 Think about it, we need a license to drive a car.  We need a license to cut hair, catch fish, or be a nurse.  Nursing home administrators must be licensed, so do stockbrokers, real estate salesmen and ham radio operators.

 The licensing list in unending.  So why not issue a license to people to go out in public only if they have been vaccinated.

 Radical thinking?  Damned right it is. And I’m aware it will likely never happen.

 But dammit death, like ugly and stupidity, is forever.

 Amen, Drew.  Perhaps one or two self-righteous defenders of their right to privacy at the expense of the right to life of others will read your words and recognize the selfishness of their attitudes.

 

 

An Untenable Position

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Missouri Gaming Commission Chairman Mike Leara was no doubt relieved by last week’s Missouri Senate defeat of an omnibus gambling expansion bill.

The bill would have saddled the cash-poor commission with even more things to regulate.

Senator Denny Hoskins’ bill would have allowed slot machines at truck stops and veterans and fraternal organizations (there is a big disagreement whether video lottery terminals are slot machines that we are not going to get into). It also would have legalized betting on sports in casinos.

The gaming commission is largely funded by admission fees paid by casinos.  One-half of the admission fees go to the commission and the other half stays with the thirteen host, or home-dock, cities. The bill did not address the problems caused by our long-outdated admission fee law.

The gaming commission had to cut more than two-dozen employees last year because the pandemic forced closure of our casinos for several weeks and admissions understandably lagged for the remaining months of the fiscal year.  The commission also reduced funding for the Access Missouri scholarship program administered by the commission by twenty percent.

The commission’s position has been further weakened by an almost decade-long thirty percent decline in   casino attendance, a drop from 54.3 million admissions in fiscal 2010-11 to 37.5-million in FY 2018-19, the last non-pandemic year. The pandemic year that ended last June 30 saw another drop of about ten million admissions, leading to the commission layoffs and reduction in the scholarship program. Admissions so far this year indicate another weak year for commission and home dock city income from casino patronage.

Pardon us while we get into some mathematics here:

The admission fee was set at two-dollars per person in 1993.

The commission, therefore, has been dealing for some time not only with declining income because of declining attendance but with declining value of the money it has collected in admission fees. Almost thirty years of inflation have reduced the purchasing power of fee income by about forty-five percent.

Those circumstances left the Missouri Gaming Commission with significantly reduced resources to regulate the casino industry, producing layoffs and taving Chairman Leara justifiably concerned about how well the commisison could regulate an entirely new form of gambling as well as regulate a large number of slot machines in veterans and fraternal organizations throughout the state.

The bill defeated by the Senate provided no protection against continued funding declines.

While the bill might have been seen by Leara as three lemons, it might be viewed somewhat differently by Missouri’s educators.

Other sports wagering bills in the last three years sought to tax sports wagering adjusted gross receipts at six to nine percent, far less than 21% rate on all other forms of gambling.  The effect of those proposals would have been to lower the state’s commitment of gambling funds to public education by tens of millions of dollars yearly. None of the amendments proposed during floor debate sought to change the Hoskins bill’s provision taxing sports wagering proceeds in the same way all other forms of gaming are taxed, a good first step in making sure next year’s sports wagering legislation protects other state interests as well rather than undermining them.

The Missouri Gaming Commission, faced with the likely return of this legislation in the next session in some form, would do well to evaluate its present financial situation that is significantly worsened by outdated gaming laws and suggest ways the legislature can protect the ability of the commission to do its job by bringing laws adopted in the last decade of the Twentieth Century into the third decade of the Twenty-first. Sports wagering legislation would be a solid vehicle to accomplish that.

Don’t say Don’t

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(As someone who hates to be told, “We can’t do that,” when he wants to hear, “How can we do this?,” this comment from more than a century ago by Dr. Frank Crane has special meaning. Rather than a phrase, he  finds—-)

ONE WORD THAT SHOULD NEVER BE USED

One word I should like to rub out of the vocabulary used by human beings, one toward another. It is the word “don’t.”

Looking back over a somewhat full and varied experience, I can say that in my judgement didactic prohibition issued from soul to soul, for every ounce of good it has done, has made a pound of harm.

“Don’t” is the stupidest, most brainless and laziest of all parental terms. To tell a child what to do requires thought, investigation, interest. To tell anyone what not to do requires no cerebration.

“Don’t” is the language of annoyance. “Do” is the language of love.

“I like very well to be told to do, by those who are fond of me,” said Alcibiades*; “but never be told what not to do; and the more fond they are of me, the less I like it. Because when they tell me what not to do, it is a sign that I have displeased or am likely to displease them. Besides—I believe there are some other reasons, but they have quite escaped me.”

To be sure, the Ten Commandments are “don’ts.”  But they are God’s, which is different.

*Alcibiades (404-450 BCE) was a general, orator, and statesman in ancient Athens, a student of Socrates.

Michael Collins

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He was the first person who could see where every human in the universe was.

Michael Collins was the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo XI mission that put the first two men on the moon.  For twenty-one hours he was alone in the CMP, Columbia, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Armstrong “were doing their small stepping and giant leaping” on the Moon, as he put it a year later in Jefferson City.  He had watched them leave in the Eagle landing module headed for the surface.  He could look out a window and see the Earth, the only other place with humans.

No man had ever been in such a lonely position as he was in July, 1969. For part of those 21 hours, he was behind the Moon, completely alone with no communications either with earth or with the two men on the surface.

Michael Collins died yesterday. He was 90.  Only one man remains alive who shared that experience: Ken Mattingly, now 85, who was the Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16.

Only four of the moonwalkers are still with us: Buzz Aldrin, 91; Dave Scott, 88; and Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmidt, both 85.  Six men who flew to the Moon but did not land are still among us—Mattingly, Tom Stafford, 90; Fred Haise, 87; and all three members of the Apollo 8 crew—Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, both 93, and Bill Anders, who is 87.

We remember Michael Collins for the day we sat about twenty feet from him (and the other two astronauts) at the Capitol on the first anniversary of the Moon landing.  NASA had put the Columbia capsule on a big truck and sent it on a tour of state capitols.  It happened to be in Jefferson City that day.  And the radio station I as working for decided to broadcast the events at the capitol.

One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph showing me at the station table with the three astronauts in the foreground. As I recall it, Governor Hearnes’ press secretary, Jerry Bryan, sent the picture to NASA and the three guys signed it.

All three had remarks that day but I thought Collins’ comments were the most meaningful—and prophetic.

“I was born in 1930 and with luck I expect to see out the end of this century.  And when I am thinking about it in 1999, I expect to remember the 1970s as a time when oddly enough, man was hesitant about pushing his frontiers back. And in 1999 we just simply won’t be able to understand that fact because by then it will have become clearly apparent that man does in fact have the capability to step out and explore his solar system and that is something we definitely should do.”

When Collins made those remarks, Apollo XII already had successfully landed on the moon the previous November. But Apollo XIII had become the program’s most famous failure in April.  The Apollo program was in suspension while the investigation of that flight went on and there would not be another Moon landing until January of ’71, with Apollo XIV.

More ominous, however, had been the announcement in January of 1970 that the twentieth mission had been cancelled. There already had been a decline in public interest in the program, despite the drama of XIII, by the time Michael Collins spoke in Jefferson City.  “Been there, done that,” in the short attention span public mind.

About two months after the astronauts were in Jefferson City, NASA cancelled flights 15-19 and then restructured the crews for what would become the last three flights to the Moon—numbers 15-17.

Those events give a special context to what Collins said on that hot July day at the capitol.

None of the Apollo XI crew ever flew in space again.  NASA wanted Collins to stay in the program but he had decided Apollo XI would be his second, and last, trip to space (he and John Young had flown Gemini 10, practicing maneuvers necessary for a Moon landing). But he left a few months later, with no regrets. He wrote in his first book, Carrying the Fire, “I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.”

He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs for a while but found “long hours…flying a great mahogany desk” was not a fit.  About a year later he became the third director of the National Air and Space Museum. He set a goal of having a building on the National Mall by the time of the national bicentennial, 1976.  The ribbon was cut by President Ford for the building on July 1, 1976.  A museum statement issued upon his death said, “That building and the museum it houses stand as a lasting legacy” to “an astronaut and statesman.”

His support for pushing the frontiers back, as he put it in Jefferson City in 1970 never waivered.  On the tenth anniversary of the first landing, he said, “It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice really—it’s an imperative.”

In these times when we our vision is so often by terrestrial concerns and often-petty bickering about them, we need not forget his belief that within us is the need “to stretch, to go, to see, to understand.”

Perhaps if we look less at one another with suspicion and instead see one another as having those innate desires to achieve, we might find light.

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