Fly Me to the Moon

And I thought my grandmother would never lie to me.

I was with my Granny Talley the day humanity first set foot on the moon. It happened exactly 55 years ago yesterday. Grandpa Talley had passed away the autumn before and Dad had dropped me off to spend part of a summer’s day with this fun, energetic, honest-to-the-core, and innately intelligent lady.

As we watched the lunar landing coverage, Granny suddenly blurted out, “Benny, you know them men ain’t really walkin’ on the moon. I think they went out somewhere in the Arizoney desert at night and set it all up. They want us to think we’re beatin’ the Russians.”

Of course, being my beloved and trusted grandmother … I believed every word she said as fact. My grandmother would never lie to me. And that’s a fact. Oh, but simply by virtue of being human, like all of us, how wrong she could be about the facts.

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Indeed, how wrong untold millions of us can be when faced with accepting scientific evidence and reason as fact.

Ask the next few people you come across if they realize that “all things eventually change over time”. Repeat “all things”. Even the most uninformed and uneducated folk among us will surely agree with you. But, wait. Just don’t call it “evolution”. Give it that name and many an otherwise reasonable soul will proceed to spout words coated with hellfire and brimstone your way.

Ask the next few people with whom you have contact if they’ve noticed there’s less snow in winter nowadays than when they were a child. They will virtually all resound with, “Yes.” But don’t you dare call it global warming … or fossil fuel-induced man-made climate change. Because if you do, you might want to be prepared to hear an emotionally entrenched denial that will roast your eardrums.

So why do so many people in America neither respect nor understand science? Why do so many of us appear to worship superstition and hearsay, instead?

It’s obvious that many of us are prone to believe conspiracy theories and pure fantasy over real science. Think of the masses of people who actually “believe” aliens landed at Area 51, or that Bigfoot roams the forests of the Northwest. You may even number among them.