Forty years ago, we were at the end of a hard year. 1968 was the year everything, seemingly, came apart.
White hatred killed Martin Luther King Jr. Arab hatred killed Bobby Kennedy. Ghettos burned across America, part of a spasm of inner-city violence that spanned the last half of the 1960s, off and on, and from which those communities never recovered.
THERE WERE student riots in Paris and police riots in Chicago. A communist offensive on the lunar new year convinced Americans that we really couldn't win in Vietnam and added the word Tet to our national vocabulary.
The world. Hell. Handbasket.
1968 was a year of grace, too. The video above depicts a big one we received on Christmas Eve -- God speaking to the world through His Word and three astronauts -- Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders -- circling the moon in an Apollo spaceship. Apollo 8, it was.
I was 7 . . . almost 8. I knew about Bobby Kennedy, and about Martin, and about the war. But it's grace that cuts through the chaotic noise when you're a kid. That was especially true in the '60s, which really were The Wonder Years, when we followed the space program like kids today follow . . . what?
Miley Cyrus?
1968 and 2008 -- radically different times unified in chaos and uncertainty. And the need for a little grace at Christmastime.
The Russians won't take this kind of crap like the Iraqis did at Abu Ghraib.
Think of it. You're a cosmonaut stuck for months and months in a single-wide in low earth orbit. There is no escape, unless you want to risk re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in that Soyuz escape capsule.
When you're on the International Space Station, you can't sit back and wait for tiny ballerinas, Hannah Montanas and Jokers to ring your doorbell on Halloween.
So what's a lonely astronaut to do?
Here's the answer to the homesick boos, from NASA and Omaha musician Chip Davis.
Davis and his group, Mannheim Steamroller, will have the astronauts on the station doing the "Monster Mash," snapping their fingers to "The Addams Family" theme and grooving to "Black Magic Woman" on Friday.
Music from one of the group's Halloween-themed albums will be beamed to the station.
"They're just shooting it up for something fun," Davis said Thursday. "That's a kick, isn't it?"
Astronauts on the space station spend weeks or months more than 200 miles from Earth, so NASA encourages them to unwind. Every morning, songs are broadcast to the station as a wakeup call. In 2005, former Beatle Paul McCartney performed at a live concert that was broadcast to the space station.
For Halloween, NASA selected Mannheim Steamroller's "Halloween 2." The group uses the synthesizer sound that gained fans for its wildly popular Christmas albums on songs associated with the ghostly holiday.
IF WHAT THEOmaha World-Herald reports is true -- and pray for the sake of avoiding nuclear war it isn't -- you might have some space travelers willing to risk re-entry without benefit of a space capsule. At least the end would be quick.
