On Saturday, February 1, 2003, I was sitting in a conference room in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, attending a meeting of skeptics and agnostics and rationalists, and listening to Skeptics Society President Michael Shermer deliver a workmanlike presentation about the benefits of critical thinking. He was most certainly preaching to the choir... but, hey, what's wrong with preaching to the choir?
It was the James Randi Educational Foundation's first-ever "Amazing Meeting", and it was going quite well. Dr. Shermer soon finished, acknowledged the applause, and made way for an unassuming man -- a man who had, up until then, been a sort of toned-down master of ceremonies, getting us from speaker to speaker or to and from meal breaks with the necessary patter. This time, as each time before, he got our attention pretty much without doing anything other than getting onstage. This time, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack had an announcement to make:
"...I want you to listen carefully to what I'm going to tell you. The space shuttle Columbia was lost a few minutes ago. At 200,000 feet over Texas, NASA lost contact and images from the ground show the shuttle breaking up and impact is reported north of Dallas...
" ... Now listen to me. I'm a career military officer. This is a tragedy. But these people were doing exactly what they wanted to do, in exactly the place they wanted to be. When Dave Scott set foot on the moon on Apollo XV he said, 'Man's fundamental nature is to explore, and this is exploration at its greatest.' Gus Grissom gave an interview a week before the fire on Apollo I and he said, 'if there's an accident, for God's sake, don't let it stop the program.' This is a tragedy, but they understood, and that's what we do in the military.
" We're going to take an hour break. We've got TVs in the lobby. We're going to try to put a signal into this TV, and of course you can go up to your rooms if you wish. And in an hour, let's call it 11:30, that's an hour and 15, we're going to continue the conference because I believe that it would be an insult to their memory to deny this audience the information that we want to give it. We can mourn, and we shall, but with dignity and grace, and remember that the space program is an amazing thing. I know astronauts. They were where they wanted to be."
That was that. The room emptied out. I hadn't come to the conference with anybody, so I went up to my hotel room by myself and watched some CNN. It was typical CNN: lots of people, very little humanity. I went downstairs to the bar to commiserate with people who, for the most part, like me, had no gods to ask for comfort or answers or a miracle. All we had was each other. And one thing everyone agreed with was that Lt. Col. Bidlack's announcement -- what he said, how he said it, what he conveyed to us -- allowed all of us to relate to what happened, to process it, somehow, maybe accept it in a way I don't think would've ever happened if I'd just been watching MSNBC when the news came over the wire...
Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack didn't just deliver one announcement that weekend. He also delivered an enlightening presentation in character as Alexander Hamilton, down to the powdered wig and tights. He continued to moderate the event itself (not in the Hamilton outfit, though). And, at one point, he told a select group of us about where he was on 9/11 (because we asked): he was at the Pentagon. He put his life at risk standing guard at the wreckage of the plane that hit it. At the risk of overusing the opposition's cliche, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack really put "country first".
Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack has instructed, protected, advised and won a crapload of medals and awards, all of which you can read about on his Wiki page. (He does a much better job of delivering his resume than I could.) Now retired from the Air Force, Hal Bidlack is currently running a tough campaign for the House Seat in the 5th Congressional District in Colorado, and I know that a little help would go a long way. He's a self-described "Blue Dog Democrat", so there are bound to be disagreements on some details, but there's one thing I do know for sure: Hal Bidlack is a good man and a principled man who is on our side in all the ways that count. I'm proud to know him, and my gut tells me we'd be proud to help him represent our common interests in the House of Representatives.
(Oh, and incidentally, despite attending a conference of godless atheists, Hal Bidlack is a believer. He made sure we all knew that at the conference, and that it didn't make him any less of a skeptic or a critical thinker. We all respected the hell out of him for that, and I'll bet we all still do. At least, I sure do!)
Here's Hal Bidlack's campaign website: Hal Bidlack for Congress
Here's his ActBlue page, through which he gets all his donations: Hal Bidlack, CO-05
... and here's a really fun Barack Obama YouTube video that features Ret. Lt. Col. Bidlack on a tour of rural Colorado: Colorado Rural Tour
UPDATE: Here's a really interesting interview with Hal from earlier this month: A Skeptic in Congress?
Let's help Hal ride the Obama wave, beat the odds and turn the heart of Colorado a deep, bright blue!