49 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
49 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
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A:\TEXT\SHUTTLE.TXT (29-Jan-86) 36 lines/80 columns/7-bit ASCII
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I think this text is considered public domain. If so, it may be freely
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distributed at your own discretion if it has not been altered violently.
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"A MOMENTS HORROR BRINGS MOMENTOUS GRIEF" edited at VANC0/Ron van Zuylen
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-----------------------------------------
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The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger will make us all a little
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less young and little less innocent.
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When we complete our inevitable national journey through the grief
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process, more of us will understand a little more deeply the lessons of these
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kinds of tragedies, lessons of the dirigible Hindenburg, of the fire that
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killed three astronauts in the 1960s.
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We will realize that any of life's endeavors carries with it the potential
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for both disaster and joy. We will realize that nothing we try to accomplish
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is free of risk.
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We are bound to live or die by natural laws that work with astonishing
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dependence--laws of gravity, laws of physics, laws that inevitably cause
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explosions when violated, no matter how harmless or unintended the violation.
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It is the way our world was created, and without these laws the world would
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not work at all.
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Our grieving began the instant the shuttle blew up.
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First there was numbness and disbelief. Even as the TV networks replayed
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the videotape it was hard to imagine that anything so disastrous really had
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occurred in a program we've all come to have so much faith in, a program with
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the Right Stuff.
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Then there was denial. Yes, we had seen the monster fireball, the
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terrible fall from grace of $1.2 billion worth of high-tech machinery, but we
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convinced ourselves that the seven crew members had not perished.
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Eventually we as a nation will work through the grief process, with its
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inevitable anger, its fault-finding, its final acceptance of what happened.
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But that will take weeks and months, even years. Now our hearts are
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broken. Now we ache for the families of teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe and
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the other six crew members. Now we feel we have no words that will help us
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make sense of something so awful and so awesome.
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In our brokenness we begin to see again how imperfect and vulnerable we
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are, how susceptible to error. And we simply want the pain to go away.
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e begin to see again how imperfect and vulnerable we
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are, how susceptible
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