The Moon Landing - 50 Years On

As I wrote extensively about the first moon landing ten years ago for its fortieth anniversary, I didn't really feel a need to say more than I already said back in July 2009.  Now that I think of it, I do have a couple of stings to say.

We went to the moon because, in 1961, John F. Kennedy proposed that we do it before 1970 (we ended up going twice before then, as Apollo 12 occurred in November 1969) to catch up with the Soviets in the space race.  And because we Americans all had a common purpose and a willingness to do what everyone thought couldn't be done, or at least thought couldn't be done within a decade, and because we were always trying to better ourselves, we set out to do it.  No one had thought we could build buildings over a hundred stories tall, get millions of people out of poverty during the Depression, build a bridge over the Golden Gate, switch from making cars to making tanks overnight for the war effort after Pearl Harbor, or establish public medical insurance for the elderly.  But all of that happened.  Once upon a time, America was a place where big things happened.  Now, apparently, China is.  

Since 1969, we've let other countries, including what John Lennon would have called some of our beast friends, get ahead of us in everything.  It took us forever to catch up in some areas, while in most of them we haven't even bothered to do so.  For one thing, at the same time Americans went to the moon, the British and the French had this equally crazy idea of traveling long distances at the speed of sound, and so the Concorde jetliner was developed.  Meanwhile, we still don't have single-payer health insurance like Canada, we still haven't figured out how to save low-lying areas from flooding like the Netherlands, and we still don't have bullet trains like Japan or France.  And so many of us are so dismissive of climate change, we're going to have to rely on other countries to solve the problem instead.    

Part of the problem is our polarization, but another part of the problem is that most politicians don't call on us to to do bold things while those who do get ridiculed, like the backers of the Green New Deal, or ignored, as when then-presidential candidate Martin O'Malley said during a presidential candidates' forum that we could build a high-speed rail network and send a manned mission to Mars at the same time, only to get as a response a collective "meh." And there's a reason for that.  No one cares.  No one wants to do anything that will take too much time and money and likely benefit someone else.  We just want to stay home and watch TV.  The achievements we celebrate, like Apollo 11, are all past achievements; we're like rock fans who always go on about the thirtieth anniversary of this single of the fiftieth anniversary of that album because there's nothing current to brag about.   

There's obviously no appetite for doing big things in These States anymore.  America has lost a lot of things that made it special, but the greatest thing we've lost never to regain is our can-do spirit.  Next time someone says it can't be done, remember . . . it can't.  Because no one wants to do it.

Sorry to disappoint all those little girls who want to be the first woman on Mars . . . 

My reflections on Apollo 11 from July 2009 are here.