Where were you?

"December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy..."

9/11/01.

I'm not the first to play compare/contrast with these two events.

But let's add two more:

11/22/63.

1/28/86.

I bet even if you don't recognize either date immediately, you can figure both of them out without looking them up.

Each of these events defines a generation. I'm just old enough to remember two. There are still people alive who remember all four.

So what do the raid on Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination, the Challenger tragedy, and the 9/11 attacks have in common?

Well, aside from being massive media events, almost nothing.

It's easy for me to dismiss the middle two as not being in the same category as the first and last, but I don't. The loss of life was tiny - orders of magnitude lower, in fact. The real, immediate consequences were far less - neither event started a war (accepting the War on Terror as a war, despite the lack of a formal, and legally required, declaration to that effect).

But each event, in its own way, was a greater tragedy. In both cases, a tragedy of lost potential, rather than lost lives.

On 11/22/63, we lost one of if not the best President of the United States of the 20th century. He'd already set us on the path to the moon and defused one of the most serious crisis of the Cold War. He still had a full year left in office, and it is hardly a stretch to imagine him being re-elected had he lived. What might he have done?

On 1/28/86, a combination of cowardly management, hasty engineering, and bad luck broke the dream of space into pieces. The Space Shuttle, already questionable on its technical and economic merits, received the final nail in its coffin, and in a very real sense mankind turned its back on space. It has yet to truly return. What if the culture of yes-men in aerospace management had broken the ranks formed only two generations ago and said STOP? Might we have recovered from our stumble and continued on our path to the stars?

We'll never know, of course, just as we'll never know what a crewman on the USS Arizona or a passenger on United Flight #93 might have done with the balance of their life.

About midway between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 sits a positive event that will also be remembered. Optimistically, I think it will be remembered even when all four of the others are forgotten. That assumes the human race survives the death of Sol, but, well, hence the optimism.

Know what I'm talking about?

7/20/69. How about now?

"One small step for man..." What Neil Armstrong and 'Buzz' Aldrin did that day was, admittedly, a stunt. They were on the moon for less than 24 hours, and they never returned. But they were the first humans to set foot on the ground of someplace other than Earth.

So remember 2011 as the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, the 70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor, or even the Centennial of the Colt 1911 if you will.

But remember also it is the 42nd Anniversary of "...one giant leap for mankind."

Where were you?