Reflections on the Half-Century Since We Landed on the Moon

Neil Armstrong with the American Flag on the Moon

For those of us who remember the July 20, 1969 Moon Landing, the commemorations present an opportunity to reflect on the time, and the half-century since.

Unlike perhaps most Americans on 7/20/69, I was not glued to a television screen. Rather, I was flying from Atlanta to Memphis (with a stop in Birmingham). With the rest of my VISTA group, I had just completed my training and was about to begin a year as a counselor and teacher at the Shelby County Penal Farm.

The event, for me, was one of conflicting feelings.

Me at the Shelby County Penal Farm (taken by an Office of Economic Opportunity photographer)

On the one hand, I was in awe of the technological achievement and the bravery of the astronauts. And it symbolized what America could do when it put its collective mind to it.

On the other hand, I was acutely aware that this same American self-confidence could become arrogance, as the tragic disaster of our War in Vietnam was then demonstrating. And my admiration of the achievement was tempered by the fact that so much of our own country was still mired in poverty, as this recent piece in Smithsonian Magazine reminds us.

So what has the last half-century brought us, and what have we brought to it?

In the United States, for the first 47 years of this half-Century, we saw (and helped create) enormous progress (albeit, not enough) on environmental matters, gender equality, reproductive rights, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and health care access.  This progress was uneven.

**  The lessons we had thought we learned from Vietnam were disregarded when the Bush II Administration invaded Iraq in 2003, leading to an horrific chain of events that destroyed millions of lives in the Middle East and is destabilizing democracy in Europe.

**  The optimism of election night 2008, when the election of President Obama by a very solid majority of the popular vote and Democratic control of both houses of Congress, seemed to portend a new day, picking up where the Vietnam-induced collapse of the Great Society coalition left off. But now the Trump Administration is hell-bent on destroying all the progress made by the Obama Administration.

**  The progress we had made in dealing with America's Original Sin of Racism -- often two steps forward, but one step back -- is now under a full-attack which is not dissimilar from destruction of Reconstruction after the Civil War. White Supremacy has always been a cancer on the principles enunciated by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.  And now, for the first time since the Civil War era, it is being unabashedly used by the President of the United States to divide the nation.

**  The Supreme Court, which had repeatedly saved the nation by applying the Constitution to free Americans from the cul de sacs of racism (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education) and minority rule (e.g., Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr -- the cases which established the principle of one person/one vote), has now opened the door to big money control of elections (Citizens United), voter suppression (Shelby County v. Holder), and sophisticated partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts (Rucho v. Common Cause)  to subvert majority rule -- and thus the legitimacy of the American political experiment.

**  Moreover, the mixed bag of benefits and dangers from advancing technologies has been staggering.  Significantly, the threats to our democratic system posed by the Russian and allied right-wing misinformation (i.e., lies) are potentially fatal.

**  Climate change has become more and more apparent and its effects pose previously unimaginable dangers.  Yet, after the Obama Administration took national and international steps to deal with the climate crisis, the Trump Administration denies that the crisis even exists and takes aggressive steps to make it worse.

We have the power to succeed in defeating Trump and his allies in next year's election.  If we succeed, we will face the next challenge of keeping Trumpism from coming back in the 2022 mid-terms.

The struggle will not be easy, but it is essential.