We go to the moon because it is hard and because it is there.
So said C.S. Lewis about Project Apollo, certainly the most positive thing to come out of a decade of turmoil. The reasons for it happening are dubious at best shaded as it is by the knowledge that ex Nazi scientists had a great deal to do with our being able to accomplish this feat. And during such turbulent times on our own planet where civil rights protests had poured out onto the streets of so many of our cities and we all took a long look down the barrel of prejudice, it seemed almost sacrilegious to commit so much money to such “puffery”. I can’t pay no doctor bills, but Whitey’s on the moon,” wrote the black poet Gil Scott-Heron, only a few years after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
Of course, with time and history providing the distance, our perceptions change and the heat of the discussion dissipates and we cannot help but look back on a monumental feat that almost did not happen due to an “error” appearing on Neil Armstrong’s computer as they attempted to land on the moon. Fortunately, years and years of preparation, obsessive attention to every possible detail, real and imagined, and a President who had a vision and the charisma to back it up collided and in the blink of an eye one man down on planet Earth responded to the “Error “ warning with “It’s a GO” and the lunar module came to rest on that place we look at on summer evenings holding hands and drinking lemonade; that place that when at its fullest is our reasoning behind a rise in automobile accidents, babies being born early and the ebb and flow of the tides.
And because of that we were proud. To this day you will often hear someone say, “Well they put a man on the moon…Why can’t they make a smartphone that doesn’t drop calls!” Because of that, we stopped our riots, and war zones became quiet, and the whole world watched as a human being stepped out onto the surface of another planet. It. Was. Remarkable.
Now 50 years later, we celebrate that formidable task successfully completed and we consider the other topics that filled the headlines of that decade which began with Viet Nam and by 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated, we were sending troops to fight and die for what, most American were not too sure. LBJ rolled out Medicare in 1965 and the Voting Rights Act became law. Martin Luther King spoke out against the war in 1966 and would be assassinated two year later. Thurgood Marshall became our first Black Supreme Court Justice and the very next year Robert Kennedy was assassinated. We got The Pill, Selma Alabama, Kent State, The Beatles, and Woodstock. And in July of 1969, a man walked on the moon.
Now, 50 years later, we must ask ourselves. Where do we go from here?
