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Generation must choose to confront challenges

Matt Chacey

Have you ever watched the stars at night? One night, finding myself without homework and a little bored sitting in my room, I decided to go for a jog and ended up sitting down and gazing upon the cosmos. As I was looking at the moon I began to think about its history. This past July, NASA and America as a whole celebrated the 40th anniversary of mankind touching the moon. Obviously I wasn't here 40 years ago, but I've often wondered what it felt like to watch as your country achieved something no one thought possible.

In front of both houses of Congress, President Kennedy proudly proclaimed May 25, 1961, that America would land a man on the moon and then return him safely to our planet, and the country would accomplish all of this before the end of the decade. To a simple civilian that goal may seem lofty, but to the people who actually knew about space travel this was a complete long shot. We'd had only one human trial and it was three weeks before Kennedy's speech. Even that was just a brief sub-orbital hop, we had no idea whether human beings could actually survive in space and cope with the physical demands that would be involved. Could they survive the radiation? And how could they actually get off the moon once they landed? In a way, when President Kennedy made that bold promise to America, the country had no idea how to realize that promise.

Yet with all of those problems in 1969 the entire world watched in wonder as Neil Armstrong said those immortal words, words that will never be forgotten, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." This serves as a testament to mankind's need to push the boundaries of possibility. We have an unquenchable thirst for what we cannot explain. We constantly pursue what cannot be done because in the deepest part of our hearts we know that it is not something that cannot be done but is instead something that just has not been done. We choose to do not what is easy, but what is difficult because the truest measure of people's strength is in their ability to rise to master the challenges life presents to them.

We are now in search of another great challenge, to once again allow us to believe in something greater than our current understanding, to go to the farthest dominion of understanding and extend into the vast area of the unknown. It is our turn now to climb those mountains that have never been climbed before, to reach for what has not been accomplished. It is our opportunity to pursue the endless number of possibilities to make this world better.

So my question to you is this, what is it that challenges you? What is your Mt. Everest? We are the generation that will define the 21st century, so what are we going to do with it? In the 1960s we dared to believe that mankind could touch a foreign rock hundreds of thousands of miles away. What is our long shot? What will we strive to accomplish even though people say it could not happen, because maybe, just maybe it can. The world is waiting for us to try.

Matt Chaceychaceme@muohio.edu