Editorial: Bean still inspiring Americans

The City of Shamrock welcomed an American hero last week as former astronaut Alan Bean gave the keynote address at the Friday banquet that preceded the big St. Patrick’s Day Celebration in that city.

A product of the Texas Panhandle, Bean was born in Wheeler, and surely no one on the second floor of that drug store in 1932 ever imagined at the time that this boy would one day walk on the surface of the Moon. But as fate would have it, Bean would eventually join the Navy, become a fighter pilot, and then… get turned down to be an astronaut. The rejection stiffened his resolve, however, and he worked harder to gain a spot in NASA’s fledgling space program. His hard work paid off, and he eventually found himself on a 250,000-mile journey to Earth’s nearest neighbor on the Apollo 12 mission in November 1969.

Bean was the fourth man to walk on the moon during a program that many consider as the greatest technical achievement of the American civilization. This boy born not so far from here was part of something that typified American greatness or, as some like to call it, American exceptionalism.

In all of human history, only 12 men have ever walked on the Moon – all of them Americans and no one since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Your editor was two years old then. Those younger than 42 have never seen someone do what Bean did.

Capt. Bean isn’t concerned by this. He notes that the Pilgrims didn’t land at Plymouth Rock until 128 years after Columbus sailed to the New World. But there was a lot of exploration done in those ensuing years… new lands and peoples discovered… new records set… and boundaries pushed further and further.

Politics is largely to blame for the languishing of the American space program. We haven’t gotten a man out of earth orbit for four decades, and right now we can’t even put an astronaut in space without hitching a ride from the Russians. In 2004, President George W. Bush outlined a new program designed to return humans to the Moon by 2020 and launch missions further into space. In 2010, President Barack Obama pulled the plug on the program.

Americans still have it in them to accomplish great things like Alan Bean did. But we have to stop worrying about how many calories are in a school lunch, how to make life easy for the non-productive, or how to have a government program to take care of people from the cradle to the grave. We need leaders who lead, a government that sets goals which actually push us to achieve greatness, politicians who respect and understand the importance of science, and a president who will inspire to again be the greatest nation on God’s earth.

But until that happens, I will be thankful that my kids got the opportunity to meet an American hero and hope that they understand the greatness of the man and the enormous importance of what his generation did for all mankind. My son says he wants to go to Mars. (Shoot a mile, his old man would like to go to Mars!) And who knows? Maybe someday, when things are right, maybe he – or his sister – can follow in the footsteps other kids from the Panhandle, like Alan Bean and Rick Husband, and blaze a trail in the sky.

Meanwhile…

No one is safe while the Texas Legislature is currently in session. The most uncompromising elements of the Republican Party are running the state, and this week they’re making headlines with the passage of an open carry bill out of the Texas Senate. The measure now goes to the House, and the governor has already indicated he’ll sign the bill into law.

Other than returning Texas to the wild, wild West, it’s not clear what the advantage of this law would be. Concealed carry is one thing, but having a good number of the population walking around with a gun on their hip just seems to increase the likelihood that some nut job will get his hands on a firearm.

Open Carry is getting all the press, but here’s some other things the boys and girls in Austin are up to. The budget proposed in the House zeroed out funding for the Courthouse Restoration Program that Donley County and others have benefitted from. It also zeroed out funding for the Texas Trails program that has helped boost heritage tourism to rural communities.

And more good news… no fewer than six bills have been filed to curtail your right to know what’s happening in your local governments by eliminating or truncating public notices in newspapers. Instead of making government more open and more transparent, there are forces in power who would like to see things kept out of the public’s view.

All of this and we still have the real issues to deal with… education financing, out of control standardized testing in public schools, and a little deal of not having enough water for our growing state. But, hey! They’re on top of the gun thing.