To be a People, and a Nation

From Arizona Daily Star

The Space Shuttles, now discontinued, are being parceled out to a few museums and places significant to their history and development.

One of them, having been piloted by Gabrielle Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, agreed to fly low over Tucson, on its journey to California.

Gabby Giffords is the Representative who was shot at a public gathering, together with several other people, just because a man with a screw loose wanted to do it, and had a gun with a magazine large enough to kill a football team.

Mari and I were not, by far, the only Tucsonans who were surprised at how deeply we were moved by the sight of that brick of a space plane, on the back of a huge 747, dipping down low over town, where Giffords and Kelly waited atop a parking garage at the University. It was, I think, something about the fragile beauty of Giffords and the audacity of a nation able to probe a short way into space coming together. In its own way, the space program is as fragile as a human life, and all of us who could got to see a nation saluting the courage of Giffords and Kelly, as they reciprocated what the nation itself had done.

Like the shuttle on the back of the 747, absurd and wonderful, we cheered what is both very large and very small about who we are, and what we can do, and that there is something very human and personal about being part of a nation.

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