America’s tragedies and triumphs always end up on screen. Consider this—with the news cycle going full tilt with the ICE crisis in Minnesota, an interesting story flew under the radar—the 40th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion and its live broadcast on Jan. 28, 1986.

This ill-fated launch resulted in the deaths of all seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, and became a cultural touchstone for a generation. It was essentially the “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?” moment for Gen X—many of whom, like me, watched the doomed launch real-time at school. 

For those of us in Mrs. Rodkin’s seventh grade science class at Petaluma Junior High (a catch-all semester, which included everything from Bunsen burners, spitting on microscope slides, and (gulp) sex ed, the Challenger launch was intended to be an epochal educational moment. And it was—just not as anticipated. 

A blocky TV was wheeled in on a cart so our class could witness the historic broadcast. And then, 73-seconds after liftoff, towers of smoke braided in the skies above Cape Canaveral. Before most of us 12-year-olds could register what had happened, Mrs. Rodkin, tears welling behind her glasses, quietly turned off the TV.

Our nation invented the televised tragedy. Ours was the first nation to bring cameras into war—from the glass plate photography of the Civil War to the first televised atrocities beamed from Vietnam. The Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assasination still looms large in the public imagination, and every atrocity since the invention of the iPhone has a permanent half-life on the Internet. Screens are how we live… and die. In the intervening decades since the Challenger explosion, what we call “TV” has changed (in most of our pockets is a micro-studio that instantly can beam images to the world) but the effect is the same—this is our lens on the world. But we don’t just watch—now we react and we change—and not just the channel. Without our phones, the narrative of recent events, for example, would and could only have been shaped by the powers that be. 

40 years ago, a Reagan-appointed presidential commission later traced the Challenger disaster to a small but catastrophic failure: a faulty O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster. Are the events in Minnesota America’s O-ring moment? Is the seal finally being broken such that the nation’s faults are finally visible to everyone who needs to see them? Maybe the revolution will be televised. Talk to me in three years.

Speaking of three years, after the televised trauma of the Challenger explosion, in 1989 another epochal event was likewise televised—the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Commemorating the moment,  a lanky, one-hit wonder summed it up with—what else?—a video.

Time to let Jesus Jones take the wheel: “Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.” It’s time to stop hitting snooze, America. Let’s wake up from history.