40 years ago today, Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, were the first men to land on the moon.
In what will forever be billed as one of human kinds most courageous achievements, today is not only a celebration of things accomplished, but of what we are capable of, if only we have that same courage.
It was 1969 and the United States was a country divided. John F. Kennedy, a young charismatic democrat had been elected president, and had inherited an unpopular war from Dwight D. Eisenhower, an older republican President. Not only were Republicans and Democrats divided, but young and old were divided as well.
It’s likely that that there had been no other time in American history in which the “Generation Gap” had been so widely felt. It seemed as if parents and their children had nothing in common. History is resplendent with its descriptions of the time. Haight Ashbury, Hippies, the Age of Aquarius, the Summer of Love. While Walter Cronkite finished his nightly newscast with the words “And that’s the way it is,” his daughter was listening to Jimmy Hendrix sing Purple Haze at Woodstock.
The world, and Americans needed something to rally around. We needed something that would unify us again, as parents and children, as republicans and democrats, and as human beings. That something was the Apollo Space Program.
There are many similarities between those days and these. Again, we are a nation divided. We once again find ourselves in the midst of an unpopular war. We once again find ourselves a political house divided. We once again find ourselves with a generation gap that seems very difficult to breach. But unlike then, part of our division has something to do with our very own survival, the survival of future generations and the survival of our own species.
We find ourselves divided by whether or not we should care for, or not care our planet Earth. Whether the question is man made Climate Change or whether we should continue to move forward with the burning of fossil fuels as a viable means of energy creation, these topics and all the issues that encompass them, have divided us.
The purpose of this article is not debate this divide, but to highlight the fact that we need to come together. We need another effort, the likes of which the world has seen only once, to ensure clean water, air and soil for all mankind. We need an effort akin to the Apollo Space Program, with all peoples behind it and the government of the United States, leading it.
We have accomplished great things. Let’s rejoice in those accomplishments, but let us never forget that there is so much more to accomplish.
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