Posted on 07/21/2009 12:34:54 PM PDT by SpareChange
Forty years ago today, at precisely 8:17PM, two Americans rode a flimsy marvel of engineering down to the first manned landing on the moon. Few slept that night, the heat of another sticky July evening passed unnoticed across the United States. For several hours that night, the world briefly contracted to a square-foot of grainy black-and-white television, and millions watched as a human being set foot on another world. Forty years ago today, the possibilities were limitless.
Forty years ago, I was nearly the same age my son is today, that summer that I crossed “the great divide” from primary to high school. My country was neck-deep in an unpopular war, and political and social unrest simmered fitfully everywhere I looked. It was a daunting world for a teenager to awake from childhood and begin to determine their place in the future.
But that night was different – the possibilities were limitless, and the night was so full of hopes and dreams that remembering it now brings tears to my eyes. I did not yet know the path my life would take from there, but I was not worried – it was a night for both aspiration and inspiration.
From the same mythology that gave names to our spacecraft, we have Icarus, the putative first pilot. Flying too close to the sun, his waxed wings melted, and he plummeted to earth. Thus, it is said, the gods punish hubris – undue pride – and the Bible agrees that pride comes before the fall (Proverbs 16:18).
Some say that July 20th, 1969 was an American apogee, our highest point of ascent before an inevitable decline, and history seems to support that idea. The moon missions ended before I finished high school, and the space program all but evaporated, returning only as a shadow of itself. We ended that unpopular war under poor circumstances whose effects are still felt today. The unrest of those years have mutated over time, but remain in various forms to haunt us. The American economy, a thundering engine of production in the Sixties is now a feeble thing, propped up by massive debt.
The Apollo 11 mission has become a one-liner: “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t [____].” In our present era of hip-ironic introspection, we are aware that we have lost something valuable, but we cannot recall what it was. Like a drunken actor, we bumble about the world stage, forgetting our cues, and apologizing vaguely for sins not of our own making. But what crested that night forty years ago was not the tide of American achievement – it was our ability to collectively dream, to aspire, and to turn those aspirations into feats. The budget debates that gutted the space program were not about limited resources, but limited vision. For our brief indulgence in hubris, we were not punished by the gods – we chose to punish ourselves, and we are still doing it now.
It comes as no surprise then that the issues today are still hampered by a lack of vision. We seek better health care, but we cannot imagine it except by gutting our economy. We seek to reverse the current recession, but we cannot image it except by profoundly deepening the very debt-speculation that caused it. That very real sense of American Exceptionalism that propelled us to the moon has been replaced by a shabby cousin, American Entitlement. De Tocqueville must be spinning in his grave.
JFK harnessed that very powerful force, the American ability to collectively aspire, and created a vision that drove us to a goal that would have been unimaginable in another age or in other hands. We put a man on the moon. Since then, other Presidents have succeeded and failed in varying degrees to do the same. It’s what Presidents do, or what they should.
Our President seeks to implant a new vision, but it is small and self-referential in comparison, and too tangled in retributive notions of social justice to succeed. In the end, it will be defeated by the same kinds of budget debates that brought down the space program before it ever really gets off the ground. A vision needs more than hope to achieve change – it must inspire a nation to something greater, not merely play on real or manufactured guilt, or re-arrange society along some alternate ideological view.
I cannot look at the moon without remembering that night forty years past and without being inspired. Tonight, however, I will reflect on what it is my son will envision for the future of his country, and whether or not it will inspire him the way that “one small step” forty years ago inspired so many of us.
If we’re lucky, his generation will succeed in leaving more than footprints behind.
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David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College, and writes Spare Change weekly in his spare time.
...sticky July evening , We used to have those. Last evening our evening temp got down to 58 degrees in SE Wisconsin.
The Apollo program was a triumph of engineering owed in no small part to Warner Von Braun. The Saturn V moon rocket was a marvel that we could probably not equal even with today’s technological advances. The Orion moon program is just an Apollo knock off that we should have pursued in the late 1970s rather than the ill fated designed by a committee Shuttle.
Isn't it wonderful!! Unless, it was humid, also. Then, not so wonderful. I thought this summer has been great; plenty of rain and COOL!!! I live in CO. Sorry to get off track.
Wernher
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