“I would have liked to have been there back when we were just gong to the moon. A time of hope. Shining city on a hill and all that.“
The moonshot was momentum of the age you describe which by then was otherwise browning and curling at the edges. Talk to anyone who was over sixty in 1969 and unless they were a pervert or an aging downtown hipster they would deeply lament the direction the culture was clearly going. Indeed the press, when reporting the latest Boomer demands and plans for the future, would always interview an old person for reaction and always citing their age when doing so. Those old men were right. What they promised we would someday see, we have and worse.
A friend, years ago, asked me if I remembered the news shows from the late sixties when we were between eight and ten years old and I said I did. Cities burning seemingly constantly. Huge angry protests, dogs, firehoses , B 52s dropping payload, the VietNam death toll every night and endless stories on “the generation gap”.
The moon landing was a happy bubble in an angry and getting angrier boiling cauldron. The culture was degrading and the old men knew it. I, as a ten year old, thought their time was past and that they should put their OTHER foot in the grave, lie down and STFU. Now I am an old man and I am right, like they were in their time and, hopefully, like my son will be in his. (So far so good on that score).
You are talking about those people who were adults in the Depression and were for the most part not in the Armed Forces during World War II, in other words, pre-Greatest or G.I. Generation.