America’s Finest Hour

NASA Photo. Taken from Apollo 8 by William Anders

As America possibly Enters its Death Spiral, When Was Our High Point… and What Happened?

I have taken a lot of shots at my home country, and will continue to do so. That’s because it fully deserves to be hit by deep criticism, most crucially by Americans, themselves. And because I love it. The United States of America is wonderful and terrible. Its founding ideals are its crown jewels, its stupendous, majestic, amazing landscape its royal inheritance, its people industrious, brilliant and, mostly, fun-loving and good-hearted. Ideals. Environment (including life forms). A melting pot of people. That’s America… with those ideals being the real differentiation between this nation and all that came before.

America has never, yet, fully lived up to those founding values: liberty, equality, justice, pursuit of happiness… for all. The long and winding attempt to create a “more perfect union” and extend those rights to all citizens has, since the beginning, been forestalled by conservatives determined to “conserve” their own advantage, privilege and power… an enterprise entirely un-American. That they, absurdly, deem themselves the “real patriots” merely shows how deceitful they are, including to themselves. Yet primarily from this selfish impulse springs the multitudinous gross sins and utter depravity that stinks up way too much of American history, from the triple original American sins: abuse of Native Americans, Black slaves and the environment, to just about every major social and political scandal since Anglos landed at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, including the proliferation across the globe of some the worst, most unhealthy food ever devised by man.

There is, of course, a flip side of the coin. Not only did America let loose modern democracy and “individual rights” upon the world, it helped usher in the modern world we know, leading — or quickly joining — the pathway toward scientific, technological, medical, social and moral evolution of human culture. America has stepped up, in war and peace, to aid far-flung fellow humans, defeated enemies and even the natural world… when it wasn’t invading some poor black or brown nation to steal its resources or spilling a gazillion gallons of oil into the blue sea. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

But now that conservatism is ascendant in the U.S., determined to take this nation back to 1952, 1928, 1888, 1846 or, who knows, the Middle Ages?, and, thus, possibly to never again be a beacon of liberty, equality, discovery and progress, perhaps the time is right to consider what might have been America’s finest hour. There is but one, shining choice.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the American astronauts of Apollo 8 were orbiting over the dark side of the moon, taking black-and-white photos of craters never before seen by humans when, to their amazement, a blue and white ball appeared on the horizon. It was something no one at NASA had even considered, an “Earthrise.” William Anders hurriedly reloaded his camera with color film and snapped a picture. There, for all humanity to take in, was the desolate, gray-brown, cratered plain of the Moon and floating above it a tiny, thumbnail-size and shaped orb, our planet, looking like a sapphire on a jeweler’s jet black velvet pad. No one who saw that photo could ever think of our “big, wide world” the same again. The photo wasn’t just a curiosity, nor just a work of art, it was a spiritual epiphany… for those enlightened enough to perceive it.

Shortly after the mission, Frank Borman said he was hopeful that the space program would move humanity “away from totally nationalistic interests; we may develop a closer relationship among the people. I firmly believe that.”

Six months later, two Apollo 11 astronauts from America in their “Eagle” lunar lander, touched down on the Moon. Though the first word spoken from the lunar surface was, “Houston,” there was little “Yee-haw… look what we Americans have done!” Indeed, as Neil Armstrong took the first human steps on the Moon, with the American flag on his shoulder, he brought all of humanity with him: “A small step for (a) man, a giant leap for mankind.”

Every human soul alive and watching or listening that day was also an American… in spirit… in pride… in wonder… in bravery… in technological wizardry… in intrepid inquiry. And in goodness. Though it was the American flag left on the Moon, the achievement was devoted to peace and goodwill among Homo sapiens… and respect for the natural Universe. The safe splashdown of the Apollo 11 command module, Columbia, in the central Pacific Ocean was the crescendo of America’s finest hour.

Americans would return to the Moon five more times (Apollo 13 being forced to abort). Each time, the science and technology was impeccably remarkable, but less and less interesting to folks back home. In retrospect, the lack of astonishment is astonishing. But by Apollo 17, it was “Meh, another Moon shot. What time does ‘All in the Family’ come on?” The last time humans set foot on Earth’s starkly lovely and crucial satellite (without it, humans likely would not exist) was December 7, 1972, nearly 50 years ago. There are six American flags “flying” on the Moon. In 2020, another nation’s flag finally joined America’s… the Chinese… planted by a robotic arm, not a human‘s.

The astronauts were scientists and engineers, not particularly inclined to waxing philosophically or spiritually about what they saw looking back on Earth from the black heavens. One of them, Apollo 8’s Borman, later quipped that NASA should have sent a poet to describe it properly.

It took a little while, but America produced a close facsimile of that poet. Some 20 years after the Apollo 8 mission, the astronomer Carl Sagan recalled “Earthrise” and a subsequent image taken from Voyager 1 looking back as it left the solar system at a pixel-sized Earth, referring to our home planet as a “pale, blue dot.”

“Consider again that dot,” Sagan asked. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being that ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father and hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast, cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from our self…. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot.”

Yes, America is still in the space game, along with many other nations. And even individuals. It’s a veritable Wild West of egregiously egocentric billionaires competing with each other to see who has the biggest phallic symbol… and who will be the first to become even richer by selling rides (for the rich) into space or adventures to Mars. Great, another planet humans can pollute and despoil.

But something is very different with this space race. Not only are there millions of more pieces of junk orbiting like pesky gnats around Mother Earth, and space has been — of course — militarized… but the whole enterprise reeks of fame, fortune, in-your-face nationalism, and, perhaps, desperation. Elon Musk, for one, seems certain that Earth is doomed… or at least sooo irredeemably 1969… that humanity better be thinking of abandoning the old, trashed hulk, sooner rather than later. He plans to die on the red dirt of Mars. Such is his loyalty to and affection for the pale blue dot. Across humanity we can see a conservative, authoritarian swell that, likewise, evidences little regard for the planet, while roiling with Sagan’s description of “imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position.” Well, advantage, privilege and power, that’s what conservatives conserve. As Global Warming ramps up around us and the odds of ecological Armageddon rise, that age old human hubris may finally do us in. Thank goodness, the Musk Expedition will be left to carry that stupidity and selfishness out into the cosmos.

From this crossroads of America teetering toward theocracy on the whims of a medieval Supreme Court while in a proxy war with Russia and as Mother Earth gets angrier by the season, the achievements of America’s Apollo program seem almost legendary, but at the same time quaint, perhaps even naive. What was the point of it all?

Well, to be the best humans: to achieve the impossible, for the knowledge, for the good, for the all. A giant leap for humankind.

Hmmm… a “leap” that we found a way to squander with stupid, selfish back-steps… in Vietnam… in Watergate… in Stagflation… in Iran/Contra… in the Savings and Loan Scandals… in the Gulf War… in Monicagate… in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession… in Birtherism and the Tea Party and stolen Supreme Court nominations… in Donald Trump and the return of zombie racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, religious zealotry, science denial, corporate pirating, fossil fuel addiction, assault rifle fetishism, white supremacy, yet another bungled hurricane response, election chicanery, and, yep, insurrection.

The heyday of Apollo, the end of the 1960s, certainly had its problems. A whole lot of liberal changes have made things better for millions of Americans — and people around the world — since those days. But what that timeframe had going for it was abounding confidence, not just hope but surety, that humanity was moving forward in the right direction, toward a brighter, better future for everyone. Not everyone agreed with this perspective, of course. A big chunk of the populace was uncomfortable with those times, even terrified, because the injustice, unfairness and errors of culture were being pointed out, no longer ignored or tolerated. Movements were afoot: civil rights, Black power, feminism, the LGBTQ movement, environmentalism, animal rights, consumer and worker safety, rights for the disabled, corporate regulations, drug legalization efforts, anti-nuclear protests, educational modernizations, food stamps and other assistance to those who were falling through the cracks of an often cruel capitalistic framework. The hippies were largely right in their worldview, and much of their “crazy” ideology is accepted as normal today. Their vision was an all-inclusive dream. What is best for everyone? What is best for the planet?

Perhaps not coincidently, the hippies’ dream flared and faded away with the Apollo program, itself the dream of a liberal visionary, President John F. Kennedy. By the 1980s, America was being led into a 1920s-style, selfish, corporate-absorbed rat race, exacerbated in the following decades by the “Reagan Revolution’s” flip from liberal economic policy (prioritizing the bulk of Americans: working families and the poor) to conservative economic policy (prioritizing benefit to the richest individuals and largest corporations… that would “trickle down,” umm-hmm) ushering in the “Greed is Good” mantra still reverberating today.

America looks at itself very differently now. A majority of American families live paycheck to paycheck, with financial disaster just one illness, injury or layoff away. About 99% of the public — liberal and conservative — say the country is headed in the wrong direction, whatever that could mean coming from opposite sides of the political spectrum. The surety is shot. The abounding confidence is kaput. Hope is on the ropes. The American Dream has winked into a nightmare. The world looks at us differently, too. We are a clumsy oaf at best, an evil predator at worst. Our old allies look at what America has become with a mix of pity, sorrow, regret, disgust… and schadenfreude. Conservatives say they don’t care what the world thinks. Yeah, add another problem to the long list.

Few Americans heeded Sagan’s words and warning. The great spiritual lesson of Earthrise was ignored. We did not deal more kindly with one another, and have totally failed to preserve and cherish the pale, blue dot. The dire consequences of our hubris, our selfishness, our willful ignorance, our impulse to ignore science and believe in lies have brought us, quite possibly, to the last days of the world humans have known since there were humans.

A few years ago, the Apollo 8 astronaut who took the “Earthrise” photograph, William Anders, sadly admitted any lasting, collective, cultural-ecological epiphany had not come to pass. “I don’t think the Apollo program has yet brought as worldly a view, an interlocking view of humankind that I had hoped. And even today when I hear people chanting we ought to go on to Mars, I’m thinking, well, why don’t we get our act together on Earth first, and go to Mars as human beings not as jingoistic Americans or Chinese or Russians or Indians.”

Apollo 8 commander, Jim Lovell says something similar: “It makes me feel a little bit disappointed. We did something that ended up showing the Earth and its people exactly how we exist, where we are, that we are really on a spacecraft and we are all astronauts, and whether we like it or not, like we were on that spacecraft, having to work closely together to accomplish the mission; down here we can’t seem to do that.”

Will the collective of worldwide cultures ever look at another, singular culture with the approval and admiration and fondness and inspiration that it held for the United States of America, for a brief, golden moment in time when that photo of Earthrise and those first steps upon the lunar surface flashed across the consciousness of humanity? Maybe it’s some other nation’s turn to turn the world on, to inspire, to restore hope, to do something, anything, for “humankind.” Denmark? Norway? New Zealand? South Korea. India. Argentina. South Africa. S.O.S.

As a believer in America the Possible, America the True, America the Good, America the Beacon, America the Creator, America the Perfected (or at least more perfect), the liberal America defined by the Preamble to the Constitution, and as a defender of Mother Earth and all of her children, I will cling to that rope of hope. America is still unique in the world. Everything conservatives hate about their own country are actually its greatest strengths: that melting pot of people, those immigrants, those black and brown people, those artists and creators, those teachers teaching truth, those nurses pushed to the limit helping idiots survive the pandemic, those journalists busting the balls of liars and wrong-doers, cops who refuse to shoot first/ask questions later, those big cities and sprawling islands of blue voters, those liberal original values, those purple mountains majesty that conservatives would decapitate for ten bucks. Dark forces are arrayed and seemingly growing stronger, but I will fight them for my country and my planet as an American who understands we’d better all become citizens of Earth, first and foremost, or “nations” may well cease to be relevant.

Earthrise | Psyche Films

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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.

Copyright 2022, Rusty Reid