Malcolm Cutchins: New Year is a time for reflection

As the New Year rolls in today, most of us will make some kind of an assessment of 2008. The events of the past year have certainly reminded us that material things (and even football team success, for example) can vanish in a hurry and we dare not consider them to be worthy of worship or elevate them to invincible status.

Thinking back over the previous year, about the only for-certain things we can note to be precisely consistent are the orbits of our earth, sun, and moon. Such an observation we are privileged to make every day and most every night should remind us of our Creator, you know, the one our Second Continental Congress described in the Declaration of Independence (the giver of “certain inalienable Rights … Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” before our federal government snuck in to grant these).

And the one described to the whole world as Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, 40 years ago last week. The photo of a full-color Earth at the time hovering over the craters of the moon is perhaps the most famous picture ever taken. The astronauts read from Genesis 1 — as replayed on national television last week in commemoration of the anniversary.

In the words of NASA’s first Flight Director, Chris Kraft (“Flight,” 2001), “In the final minutes before they went behind the moon again, [the astronauts] read from Genesis: ‘In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth …’ No eye was dry in mission control. Nor, I’m told, in the newsroom packed shoulder to shoulder with reporters covering the greatest story of their lives. And maybe not even anywhere that televisions and radios were playing on Earth. Frank Borman had the last words: ‘…from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with: …A Merry Christmas. And God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.’”

That united sense of awe among so many people that night was just one contribution to many years of blessing for our nation. Gradually though, we have found more and more things to be divided about, and fewer worthwhile things to be awed by.

As we look backward, the economic woes of 2008 should be a warning that wrong governmental policies can hurt every one of us; even years after their application begins (in this case poorly thought out loan policy starting in the Carter years and greatly intensified in the Clinton years and since). Finally, in 2008, like rotten apples in a barrel, the almost worthless loan-papers that couldn’t be paid back were distributed throughout the U. S. and world financial systems. When will we learn?

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What a great front page of this newspaper on Christmas Day! No current bad news; only the good news of 2,000 years ago as recorded by the physician in Luke 2. It has been nice to have a lull in the hectic pace of life along with good weather over the Christmas holidays.

Dr. Malcolm Cutchins is an emeritus professor of engineering of Auburn University and writes a weekly column for The Opelika-Auburn News.