52 Years Ago Tomorrow!

 We bought our first color television set on July 18, 1969. It was the first one in the extended family. We could watch the moon landing in color. Wow! On July 20, 1969, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and assorted friends gathered in our tiny living room to watch, in color, Americans land on the moon. We saw the giant leap for mankind. We saw two men walk on the moon. It was amazing! It was, for some, unbelievable. It was broadcast in black and white.

 

We, the United States had won the real race for space, the one started by the Soviet Union when it launched Sputnik in 1957. We put ten more men on the moon in the years that followed; the last one was in 1972. The whole adventure was a technological series of events that mesmerized the world. Then it became routine enough so that people were too busy to watch a landing on the moon. We bore quickly.

 

A couple of weeks ago, a multi-billionaire, Richard Branson rode a plane to the edge of space, some 50 plus miles above earth’s surface. A bunch of civilians earned their astronaut wings in a commercial venture.

 

Tomorrow another multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, and other passengers will venture to 62 miles above the earth’s surface; above the Karman Line, the real edge of space. Both billionaires see space as a cash cow. Virgin wants to send up flights every few weeks at a quarter of a million dollars per seat. Bezos wants to send people to Mars and back.

 

Where is NASA? The government space administration is still doing science, I guess. We can give them that. They created, launched, and supported an international space station, but they no longer have a spacecraft capable of reaching it. They relied on Russian rockets for a few years and now rely on multi-billionaires commercial rockets to get them to the space station.

 

Years ago, when flying was still an adventure, and only for the better well to do, the Sunday drive often included a stop at the end of the runway at Lambert Field, St. Louis, to watch planes land and take off. When TWA bought its first 747 it parked it near one of the closer gates and allowed visitors to tour the plane. They might never fly in a “jumbo jet,” but at least they had seen one up close. Flying was exciting back then.

 

NASA hasn’t given the public an exciting event in years. Scientists get excited about the pictures from Mars, of galaxies far away, of black holes forming and eating up small stars, and slogging through other faraway phenomena. It is all good learning, for sure. But how does it help Jane and Joe Six-Pack? Where is the excitement?

 

When Apollo went to the moon, the onboard processor ran at 0.043 MHz. That means that the phone in our pocket is 100,000 times more powerful. The Chinese landed a module on the backside of the moon that is studying the universe from that angle and searching for ways to control satellites from there. They have a rover on Mars broadcasting data that will help them land people, up there before we do. Will we relive the panic that overcame America when the USSR put Sputnik into orbit in 1957?

 

Where is NASA? Where is the American spirit that drove us to previous greatness that created excitement for the world? We were united then. We had an overarching belief that we could do anything we wanted, and quicker than anyone else? Where is that belief today?

 

Where is our belief in the scientific process? Even basic science has gone political. Huge numbers of people still believe that covid-19 was and is a hoax. Nearly half the population believes the vaccines are fake science, that they contain materials, at the request of the government, that magnetize us, that change our DNA, that has miniature chips that allow the government to track us and force us to do evil. Over 600,000 Americans have died because of covid and still too many don’t believe the news. In those areas of the country where vaccination rates are low, the virus is spreading like wildfire. But people still resist the vaccine which they consider a liberal effort to control the people. If we can’t believe in a process as simple as a vaccine protecting us from a virus, how will we believe that science can take us to the limits of space?

 

Let’s not put all of the blame on NASA, but they are part of the problem. They owe us some scientific excitement! Why only shoot for Mars? Let’s put the smartphone to good use!

The 4th!

 

The American President, a mid-1990s movie, had a short scene in which a politico from a university with a top-notch football team asked the President to do something about how Title IX was being implemented. When reminded that the law was an effort to eliminate discrimination in women’s sports, he complained that while he knew about the law, he was upset because the government was trying to enforce it.

 

Around July 4^th each year is a time for scholars, news reporters, and pundits to tell us what they think Independence Day is all about. This year some told us that a once historical unifying institution now seems like empty rhetoric to too many, people of different races, different cultures, and surprisingly, wait for it, different political parties.

 

The land on which the US sits has been here for over four billion years, but the nation we call the US, is relatively new. The first established town was St. Augustine, in 1585, Jamestown began in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. It took another 150 years for the colonies to declare their independence from Britain, and they did it with fervor. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” We are, after 245 years, still a work in progress.

 

Another eleven years passed before “We the People …” formed an effective government. History always has two versions, one written by the winners, and the other by the vanquished. Depending on where you lived, you may have studied the history of the Civil War or the history of Northern Aggression. White people, consciously or unconsciously, wrote Elementary and high school history texts, for white people and they were used as a tool for indoctrinating patriotism. Civic classes taught about the great ideas in the Declaration and the Constitution without paying too much attention to how many of them owned slaves, how they counted Blacks in the census, or who could vote.

 

Those history books may not have mentioned the Japanese internment camps, or highlight the anti-American hatred of the Klan toward Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. They did not tell us about the Tulsa massacre, the lynching of Blacks in the modern South, and other shameful events. Even today, in state after state, white-dominated legislatures are making it illegal to teach these things

 

The internet allows people to learn more than what is contained in constrained textbooks. Information is instantly available about both our greatness as a nation and our warts. Increasingly the well-educated populous peals a clarion call for history to be, “Accurately – and fully – taught.[i] That means that a lot of what we learned twenty, thirty, or even sixty years ago, and what we didn’t learn, requires reexamination, a different slant, and more truth. That will not be easy for many, especially for the person in The Villages in Florida a few months ago who raised his fist while driving his golf cart, shouting the need for “White Power.” It will not be easy for those who are doing everything possible to keep people from voting in the next election.

 

The Declaration says all people are created equal; some, like the Alabama sports fan, are upset that so many want the “law” enforced. It says that people have a right to life; they want the “law” enforced. The “law” says people should be able to pursue happiness; they want the “law” enforced.

 

Sometimes we overlook this section of the Declaration: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men … “People want that “law” enforced as well. The purpose of our government is to ensure that we all enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In addition, people want the “WE” to include everyone.

 

So, what does July 4th mean to us? Rather, what should it mean to all of us? It should be an opportunity to celebrate our achievements in our progress toward the guiding principles of our founding documents. We have always said we are not a perfect union, but most take pride in making the effort. For too many, however, the guiding principles are simply words on paper, not their reality. We can change that if we want to.

 

If any of our actions, the actions of a group, or the government does anything to make one person less valuable than another person, it goes against the American spirit. We know those who flaunt un-Americanism in the name of patriotism: the Klan, private militias that invade state capitols, insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol on January 6^th. We know about the banks that redline real estate loans, lending institutions that charge interest based on race, the school boards that create or tolerate racial or gender disparity of resources, and others that discriminate based on race, gender, religion, orientation, nationality, or other reasons. We can change the direction of the country if we want to.

 

All we have to do is agree that all people are equal and start treating them as equals. That is how we enforce the “law” written by the founding fathers.

 

 

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[i] Kathleen Parker – How long will people talk about critical race theory? -Washington Post – July 4, 2021