“This is an important day,” the teacher said. “Do you know why, Virginia?”

Virginia shook her pretty little bleach-blonde head and the teacher sighed.

“Today is important, Virginia, because thirty-five years ago on this date, human beings did something that previous generations had not thought possible: they walked on the Moon.”

Virginia stared blankly at her teacher for a long moment. Then her jaw slowly went slack and the teacher felt a brief sense of triumph, thinking he’d finally gotten through to her. He was mistaken. Her mouth closed as languidly as it had opened, then opened again. Virginia had resumed chewing her gum. She chewed with her mouth open, producing a concerto of wet snapping noises. Her eyes reflected the profound boredom that only a teenager is capable of feeling.

The teacher was disappointed. He so much wanted Virginia to grasp the significance of July 20, 1969. He wanted her to feel excited at the idea that men had once summoned the courage and intelligence to fling themselves across the void to Earth’s nearest neighbor, that for one amazing, unprecedented moment the entire world had stopped trying to destroy itself long enough to watch fuzzy black-and-white TV pictures beamed back from the farthest frontier human beings had ever broached in person. He just didn’t understand why kids today weren’t interested in space exploration like his generation had been, or, for that matter, why so many of his own generation had lost interest as they’d grown older.

He knew that if he signed onto the Internet and consulted Google News he’d find that the search engine’s most important science and technology story of the day was Apple’s announcement that it was bringing out a cheaper model of iPod. That would probably interest his vacuous student, who sat in front of him day after day in retro hiphuggers — low-rise jeans, he corrected himself — and tight t-shirts. She was beautiful, he thought, so much more sexy and sophisticated than girls had been when he was her age, but she was also superficial, lacking in imagination, interested only in materialistic goals… totally Earthbound. The Moon wasn’t as important to her as American Idol and the only Armstrong she was likely to have heard of was Lance, and these things made him feel unutterably sad.

The worst of it was that very few people, young or mature, seemed to feel the same way he did. The teacher knew that if he voiced any of these thoughts, he’d only confirm what his student already believed, that he was a hopeless old fuddy-duddy. After all, 35 years is a long time, long before Virginia and her peers were even born. To them, the Apollo mission occupied roughly the same period of history as World War II, or the digging of the Panama Canal, or Lewis and Clark’s scouting expedition. In their minds all those events had the same significance, which is to say no significance at all, because they all came before, and stuff that came from before was just… old. Old and boring and irrelevant in the world of MP3s, text messaging, DirecTV, Jessica Simpson, Coke C2, phonecams, and MMORPGs. The post-modern, post-Clinton, post-9/11, post-post world. A world where things like exploration and adventure were only done if there was a possible ROI and any kind of justification for doing things “just because they’re there” sounded naive.

The teacher sighed again and asked Virginia to open her textbook to the appropriate page, well aware that everything he was about to say wouldn’t mean a damn thing to her…

Okay, so my little exercise in creative writing here is somewhat over-the-top (not to mention misanthropic), but I am genuinely disappointed by how little attention today’s anniversary has attracted. I, like the fictional educator above, feel at a loss to explain what has happened in this country to make people, especially young people, so uninterested in something that used to be so exciting. Neil Armstrong’s historic stroll around the Sea of Tranquility happened two months before I was born, but there were still echoes of it in the culture while I was growing up. People still talked about travelling into space and there was a general sense that great things awaited us as a species. But then, sometime in the ’80s, all that talk seemed to stop. Why? Was it the Challenger disaster? Was it the endless talk of how expensive and dangerous manned space flight is? Was it the growing realization that the Apollo missions were largely a political stunt meant to show up the Soviets? (My reaction to that last point has always been, “So?” The motivation doesn’t take away from the coolness of the fact that we actually did it.)

I recently picked up a marvelous DVD, part of the Walt Disney Treasures collection called Tomorrowland, which provides a pretty good time capsule of how people used to think and feel about the prospects of exploring space. The content on that DVD — old episodes of the weekly Disneyland television series — was produced in the 1950s, when the Apollo program was still a long way off, but these programs drip with optimism and enthusiasm and an absolute certainty that good ol’ American know-how will get us there someday. And it wasn’t just the Moon, either; one of the programs on the disc is provacatively titled “Mars and Beyond.” People in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s genuinely believed we could conquer space without much more than grit and pluck, and the Apollo flights basically proved that. (For example, the on-board computers that got Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon and back weren’t as powerful as today’s average scientific calculator, astounding in this age of desktop supercomputers.)

So why now, when we have technology that makes the lunar vehicles of the 1960s look like Model Ts, aren’t we still up there? The expense is a definite factor, but I believe we’d find the money if the public really wanted to do it. The truth seems to be that the public just doesn’t care, a bitter pill for old space buffs such as myself. I know there are a lot of big scary things happening down here at ground level — the war in Iraq, terrorists, the economy, a resurgence of AIDS, urban sprawl and all manners of environmental degradation — and in the light of those things it’s pretty hard to argue for manned space flight without looking like a (forgive the pun) starry-eyed dreamer, if not an out-and-out fool. But like I mentioned in my review of Spider-Man 2, we need heroes in dark times like this. We need to be reminded that human existence isn’t all shit and pain and death, and that it also isn’t all about the acquisition of the latest gadget or fashion. We need to see demonstrations of the inherent nobility of the human spirit, to exercise the curiosity that drove our distant ancestors to wonder what was over the next hill. That’s what exploration is all about, whether it’s Columbus crossing the sea, Dr. Robert Ballard diving on the wreck of the Titanic or Neil Armstrong stepping out onto the lunar surface. Sometimes we really do need to do things because they’re there, to prove that we can do whatever we decide to do. If we’re no longer interested in doing those things as a nation, a people, maybe even a species — if cheaper music players are more important than commemorating an event as significant in our evolution as the first time an Australopithicene stood upright — than maybe history really is over.

But if someone out there is still interested in the things that matter, if you, like me, believe that today should be a national holiday and that space exploration should be de-coupled from crass political game playing, then maybe you’ll be interested in the following links:

Space.com has a complete day-by-day recap of the Apollo 11 mission as well as photos and other nifty stuff here.

Naturally enough, NASA has prepared a nice anniversary package. (You’ll need a reasonably fast connection, a decent video card and sound for this to be most effective.)

And if you’ve got a conspiracy-buff uncle who keeps telling you that we never really went to the Moon and that it was all faked on a soundstage somewhere, take a trip to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site and set the ignorant fool right.