When I was just a wee little lad, I remember a president who set a huge goal that we should send a man to the moon and return him safely before the decade was out. In just seven years, we did it. 400,000 Americans combined forces to achieve what some would say is the most remarkable achievement in the history of mankind. I was also thought to be impossible.
What made me think of that was a newspaper article this morning. It seems NASA had a gripe session yesterday with members of Congress that it couldn’t develop a heavy lift rocket for almost $7 billion of our money. This, even though we have all the technology in the world, certainly when compared to the moon shot. It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel here. We know how to make a heavy lift rocket. The Saturn V was one. It took man to the moon. How hard could it possibly be to build on the lessons learned then and create another rocket that’s kind of like it. And quite frankly NASA, if you can’t build it, I bet private enterprise can. Oh, that’s right, you don’t build rockets anyway. You only mismanage the program these days.
But I digress.
I am no engineer or rocket scientist. But I am someone who has watched our American Spirit slide right down the toilet over the years. We’ve gone from “can do” to “can’t do” in a relatively short order. Then we stand dumbstruck as other countries start to take the lead in this world. It’s not that we don’t have the wealth, the smarts or the technology. We just don’t believe we as a society can do anything we set out minds out to do any more.
We have managed to accomplish so much, often with so little in the past. We fought the largest empire to become and independent nation. We figured out how to defeat a dictator bent on world domination in WWII. We cured crippling diseases. We learned to harness the power of the atom (for both good and bad, granted) and we went to the moon.
Remember, when President Kennedy said we were going to the moon, we had only completed a single sub orbital flight. We didn’t know anything about rendezvous, working in space, translunar insertion – even the materials required to go there didn’t exist. We had to create them in very short order.
Which makes me wonder why we can’t fix relatively simple things in our world. I don’t think anyone in America should not have a roof over their heads, food in their tummies or good healthcare, if they have fallen on hard times and fallen between the gaps in our society. It should never be an entitlement. But it should be a safety net. Homelessness increased 11% in Florida last year? Why do we allow this to happen?
We could solve these issues in relatively short order, if we had the same American Spirit that took Lewis and Clark across our great land and Armstrong and Aldrin to the surface of the moon.
We used to be a society of adventurers, explorers and wonderers. Somewhere along the line, we started to become a society of bitchers, whiners and moaners. We seem to wallow in our own plight, rather than rise up above it as a country, putting aside our petty differences (see media for these) and work for all of our common good.
Oddly, the power is within each of us to change this world we live in. We can do it by being civil and respectful, rejecting hate, learning forgiveness, appreciating our differences and asking what we can do for one another rather for ourselves.
Oh, geez, I sound like I grew up in the hippy era. Well, I did. I wasn’t even a teenager back then. It’s probably the closest we ever came to anarchy and the closest we ever came to true harmony and peace. The drugs helped, but those who came of age in that era had one thing we don’t seem to have anymore — hope.
I for one have hope once again. Hope that tomorrow will be better than today. That we will still come to our neighbor’s aid, that we will right an obvious wrong, that we won’t choose deceit over honesty, and that we will seek peace instead of war, not only abroad, but in the halls of our own Congress and state legislatures.
I want the American Spirit back. Whoever stole it, return it and we won’t press charges. It belongs to all of us. And it’s been stolen by those who seek to divide us or hold us hostage because they have something to sell. Here’s news for you: I’m not buying. Not anymore.
Hope is one four letter word I will repeat over and over again. I hope you will, too.
On the road in the tropics,
Robb