July 20th 1969 and the City on the Hill
Despite my general optimism about the future when I look at our youth, a special day like this causes me a certain sense of loss and melancholy. You see, it reminds me that there was a time when there was glittering city on the hill. I mean it wasn’t perfect, nothing is, and it didn’t glitter for everyone but it was there nonetheless. It was a city that made and kept great promises, promises like putting a man on the moon.
I remember that night very clearly even though it was fifty years ago, July 20th, 1969. I was a 21 year old dude working at Donaldson’s department store between my junior and senior years in college. Life was pretty simple and living really was easy – and girls smiled often! There was also a war raging far from home and I was headed there in a year or so when I graduated since I was in ROTC. But that was okay because on that night, watching on a tv sitting on a picnic table outside a friend’s house in south Minneapolis, as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, nothing else mattered because I lived in the greatest country in the world.
We have been through a lot this past fifty years, many things good and bad, but it seems obvious that this is not that America anymore. We have watched as our middle class has been devoured from within – intentionally – in the name of cheap prices and higher profits. We have apparently decided that endless wars are good for the economy even if not so great for our young troops. We have come to the conclusion that unions and public employees are now the enemy while big corporations are their victims and worthy of worship from we peons. And we've made healthcare and higher education so expensive that both are just a dream to many.
We have seen many good things as well especially in regards to recognizing that many of our citizens have had to live in the shadows because of race or sexual orientation. And, of course, we have the smart phone.
So is it any wonder that it seems like we are no longer a country full of hope, big dreams and big accomplishments? No, instead we have become a small, petty, fearful people retreating into tribes, intent on grabbing everything we own and hugging it to ourselves like some paranoid old person living alone in a hostile world. Suddenly we refuse to believe in simple science like that which got us to the moon yet happily embrace the dumbest conspiracy theories. We now distrust those who speak a different language forgetting a dad like mine who spoke Norwegian at home. We try to take back women's rights and send our LGBT friends and relatives back into the shadows to appease the least tolerant among us. We disparage those that have a different religion than ours ignoring that it wasn’t long ago that Catholics and Jews were seen as insidious outsiders. And then there's all of us white people who see danger in those whose skin color is different than ours, forgetting that in a few short years it will be OUR skin color that will no longer be the majority. There is some irony there.
They say that empires end not with a bang but with a whimper. I wonder if we hear the beginnings of those whimpers now in the cries of children kept in pens. In the cities bulging with homeless, faceless people. In the rural areas where an opioid-ridden, helpless underclass face a desperation that is usually only seen in a depression. In a country that has been in an endless war for 18 years without any outcry from the people. Where leaders, who in the name of making America great again (whatever that means), are free to violate centuries of civil behavior, assault the First Amendment with impunity and incite their followers to abuse anyone who disagrees. Those followers, who in their haste to make themselves feel empowered, will shout unspeakable things to those they are told to fear. Perhaps most guilty of all is the rest of us who stand by, wringing our hands but refusing to take a stand as we watch these perversions of all the things that made our country great.
This anniversary of the moon landing stands as a reminder that there once was a shining city on a hill. It wasn’t perfect but it knew it wasn't and always strove to be better. We now face a stark choice: try to re-ascend that hill . . . or become a city full of whimpers and, like Rome or Great Britain, turn into the next dead empire.
Choose wisely, my friends.
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