WARNING: There is nothing topical about this diary. It's not about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. It's not about Health Care Reform. It's not about Afghanistan.
It's just about a plane.
Just east of Albuquerque, the Sandia Mountains rise up like a bulwark. At their height, they pass 10,000 feet. But to those of us who live here, they're utterly ordinary. You hardly ever think about them, except when a particularly beautiful sunset paints them orange and pink, like a giant canvas. The Sandia Mountains are nothing special.
When you fly into Sunport, Albuquerque's international airport, you usually wind up flying over the Sandias. When you leave, the planes take off toward the mountains, climbing quickly to get above them. Every day, hundreds of planes arrive and hundreds of planes depart. There is nothing special about them.
And yet...
And yet. I was coming back from the university today, where I teach Statistics. I was on my way to my car, getting ready to drive home. I got off the bus, and turned toward the mountains, and there was a plane. It was big - with a long white fuselage and the swept-back, turbine-laden wings of a passenger jet. And it hung in the air, nose pointing upward, climbing toward the mountains. It happens a hundred times a day, and I never pay it any attention. Not until today.
But today, something made me stop and look. Something made me consider what this great white plane meant.
How much ingenuity did it take to put that plane in the air? A hundred years ago, the sight of a spectacle like that would draw thousands, maybe millions. People who would marvel at human ingenuity, at our ability to accomplish the impossible.
But I was born in 1980. Commercial air travel has been around my entire life. Of course we can fly. How could the world be any other way?
Of course we can split the atom. Of course we can cure polio. Of course we can put a man on the moon.
What's so special about that?
---------------------------------------------------
Today, I watched a plane take off. A thin tube of steel, carrying a hundred people or more, connected to the ground only by sensor readings and radio waves.
Hot air balloons are less than 250 years old. They were invented in 1783, seven years after our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. When America was born, no human being had ever spent more than a few seconds out of contact with the Earth's surface. Today, we don't even think twice about it.
Why did I stop to watch it?
Because we've lost our sense of wonder, our sense of discovery and wild adventure. Because when a plane takes off over the Sandias, it's a testament to generations of human ingenuity, to all the great thinkers and inventors who dared to dream of the impossible and make it real.
And because that sense of wonder is the most important difference between us and the Teabagging masses, the Creationists, the know-nothings of the Republican party.
Ignorance never built an airplane. Intolerance never cured a disease. Isolationism never put a man on the moon.
To me, this is what it means to be progressive. I want progress for humanity. I want us to keep doing the impossible. I want to feel wonder at the things we can accomplish.
I've known people - they call themselves Christians, but they aren't - who hate science because it takes the wonder out of God's creation. To these people, the world can only be wonderful if it's mysterious. Coming to understand something makes it mundane and boring. To them, a rose loses all its beauty if you know how it functions.
Oh ye of little faith.... To paraphrase Richard Feynman, how much more beauty exists when you understand both form and function, when you know all the little mechanisms of life and evolution that shaped that rose over countless millenia into the simple, elegant flower you see before you?
I watched a plane take off today.
On any other day, it would have been dull and uninteresting. Commonplace. Hardly even worth mentioning.
Today, it was wonderful.