Usually, it’s odd to be in a country where your holidays aren’t observed. We didn’t have much of a Thanksgiving this year, just a quick trip to Amsterdam and cream cheese (roomkaas) sandwiches on the way. We will celebrate July 4 no matter what because it’s our anniversary, but the rest of the country won’t be celebrating with fireworks.
There’s a set of days I always observe around now, though, that I won’t miss observances for, because there’s only one of them that other people notice most years anyway. There are two to celebrate and three to mourn.
Yesterday, January 16 was Martin Luther King’s birthday. Some people get the day off. Everyone likes a day off and I wouldn’t complain if I got one, but there may be more meaningful things to do on the day, like exercising your individual freedoms, peacefully. It’s one of the holidays that tends to be widely observed in the blogosphere and that’s a good thing, because it always gets people thinking and writing about the things Dr. King stood for. One thing it got me thinking is that whatever is deplorable about current politics, I think my country will survive – we’ve been through worse. I will know we’re serious about change when we put up with pain or inconvenience for it.
Today is Ben Franklin’s birthday. Penn alumni groups tend to plan parties for it, but I don’t know of anyone else who celebrates it. If King did as much as anyone for our individual liberties, Franklin did for our national freedom to build a system within which to practice them. That’s in addition to electrical experiments, bifocals, investigation and disproof of Mesmerism (with Lavoisier and others), the Franklin stove, public libraries and fire departments, the US post office, and so on. They don’t make polymaths like him anymore.
At the end of next week are three sad days for anyone who cares about space history – those only get attention from space program people or on big anniversaries, so you might see articles about Apollo 1 this year. The anniversaries are of the Apollo 1 fire, on January 27, 1967; the Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986; and the Columbia explosion on February 1, 2003. I’d like to see NASA declare a moratorium on launches in that week, but I don’t they will because launch windows are limited. (And because someone might think they were superstitious!)