45 Years Ago Today......

Forty-five years ago today I stood on the banks of the Indian River (not technically a river, but a lagoon) and watched the liftoff of Apollo 11, carrying three astronauts to the moon.  It was a clear beautiful morning and the liftoff proceeded without a hitch.  The entire family was there, as were several thousand spectators.  We had a clear view of the Saturn V.  It was far enough away that the noise of the liftoff took several seconds to get to us.

We watched it climb skyward.  We were seeing proof of what a great nation America was.  We were doing something then that no one else had ever done before, and that no one else, at that time, could do.  Oh, you might say that the Soviets could have done that too, and if they had made that a priority they might have done it.....but some 45 years later we are still the only nation who ever did it.

The space program at that time, especially where we lived, was a very big thing back then.  Many of us schoolchildren wanted to be astronauts when we grew up.  We figured that we would be going to Mars, and having manned space voyages to other places in the solar system.  Four days later, in the evening, millions of us gathered around television sets worldwide so that we could see live, the images of the greatest human achievement ever undertaken.

As I reminisce on these events, I think about where we are going as a nation, and wondering, what happened?  I ask myself, are the schoolchildren even taught any more that this nation placed several men on the moon, and then brought them all back alive?  Are they even aware that we did this?

Think about it.  This was an achievement that eclipsed the first flight of the Wright brothers, although that event in and of itself started a sequence of events that got us to the moon.  Bigger and better airplanes were designed and built, and we climbed higher and higher, reaching for the moon.  Nowadays, it seems as if nothing ever happened.

I think the youth of today can tell you all about Justin Bieber and explain to you what "twerking" is.  They can tell you how many friends they have on Facebook and they can explain to you how to "tweet" and what the Kardashians are up to.  But can they tell you who Wilbur and Orville Wright was, and what they did?  Do they even know that Neil Armstrong actually existed, and what he did?

It's a sad observation that I make that American exceptionalism is ill regarded by many of our nation's so-called leaders.  Yes, I get that there are other nations on the planet and that many of them have made contributions that continue to this day, to benefit the very nation that I live in.  I really don't see anything wrong with national pride, be it whether you're from Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, England......or even the US of A. 

I just don't understand why more people aren't reflecting on the events of 1969, and why we aren't doing great things any more.