‘What do we have on the spacecraft that’s good?’ is a line attributed to flight controller Gene Kranz (pictured) in the film Apollo 13. It is spoken as Gene is receiving a babble of information from his Mission Control staff as the Apollo 13 moonward-bound spacecraft is fighting for its life after an explosion in an oxygen tank. Now, the spacecraft that is the planet earth, as it spins around our sun at 66615 miles per hour, bearing its crew of approximately 7.5 billion humans, has suffered an explosion in the form of a contagious and often deadly virus that we are struggling to understand, control and overcome. The Apollo 13 astronauts came home safely. Similarly, with determination we may be able to get through what faces us now with much of what we are currently losing coming back and, we very much hope, a minimum of casualties.
The Apollo 13 mission was in 1970, and now we’re 50 years on in 2020. Yet Gene’s question could and should connect the decades and help to find the beginning of a way out from the current cloud of anxiety, confusion and panic caused by the spread of Covid-19 amongst humanity, and its drastic repercussions. This post is the first of many, far from all of which will even mention Covid-19 or coronavirus, as their aim is to be positive and not to keep returning to the painful events which are triggering them.
So what can we talk about that we have on the spacecraft that’s good?
Firstly, the fact that here in the UK and worldwide, the pandemic is being countered, and research, resources and processes are being bent towards reducing and eliminating Covid-19.
This article is being published soon after the shock of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement of drastic curbs on individual liberties in order to save lives.
However, and secondly, we can reflect that even as Covid-19 is driving us physically apart, in other ways we are coming together, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Many of these ways are online. This article is itself started out online, in a post on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, along with Zoom, Skype, Facebook, not to mention telephones (mobile and land) and more, is connecting people up in more and more ways. We’re being even more social on social media. The internet didn’t exist in 1970, nor did all almost of the things I’ve just mentioned. Yet in 1969, men landed on the moon, and in 1970 others came back from near catastrophe with barely enough power to fire up a coffee percolator.
We humans, for all our myriad flaws, are an incredibly adaptable and determined species and in the current crisis it hasn’t taken long to stop many activities and to replace them with others that can have the same impact, but which do not run the risk of encouraging the spread of coronavirus. In the business world, a whole culture of events and networking meet ups have stopped abruptly in face to face form. Instead, small, medium and large online gatherings with similar impacts have sprung up literally overnight out of existing technology. For example, the Federation of Small Business (FSB) with the work of Chandra Sharma, Piyush Patel and Sarah Marsh-Collings had its first online Bromley meeting a few days ago. Since then, at 8.30am on 24th March, there was an online session on business finance.
As Sarah said online recently, and this is only slightly edited, “It’s really important we all stay in touch and actually use the means of connection open to us. It’s easy to go into a tail spin and become totally absorbed in our own s**t – we can’t do that. Do it, and we go down alone. We’re all stronger if we stick together… If you are worried about stuff, please talk to each other. If the first person can’t help, keep asking, I bet you can be told about someone who can. Don’t suffer alone xx.”
Ask yourself what is good on your spacecraft, and build from there. We can stick together and we will get through this.
This, our first blog post on our website, isn’t about PR. It is us giving a little PR to hope and the human spirit. As a result we’ve added to our Spotify In Tune PR playlist a track from the movie, Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’.
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