The Calm Before The Storm
Trump said it. He was talking about something else. But the words landed differently this week — against Artemis, against a cyclone coming, against a beach at the edge of the Bay of Islands where I stood alone and wondered what it would mean to be a missionary today.
“An entire civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
That was Donald Trump this week.
Artemis II launched this week. Astronauts orbited the Moon for the first time in fifty years, and we were asked to celebrate.
I could not.
The heavily scripted expressions of enthusiasm broadcast from orbit were difficult to watch. Not because the achievement isn’t real, but because the celebration reveals something uncomfortable about where we still think we are: a civilization with the time and surplus to dream outward, to expand, to reach. A civilization that still believes the next frontier is up.
I remember the Apollo program. I was a child, watching from France. I remember the pride. The sense of collective possibility. It felt like the beginning of something.
We are not that civilization anymore.
Something has shifted, quietly but irreversibly. Climate change did not arrive as an event. It dissolved a premise. The idea that we could keep expanding—materially, geographically, indefinitely—without consequence.
We are no longer early in the story.
And so the question lingers: what exactly are we celebrating?
That we can still do what we did fifty years ago?
That we can repeat a gesture from a time when the constraints were not yet visible?
It doesn’t feel like ambition. It feels like continuity without reflection. Like a story we keep telling because we don’t yet know how to tell another one.
“An entire civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
He was talking about something else.
But the sentence lands differently now.