The future was supposed to be so much better than it ultimately turned out to be.
July 20th. This year was the 57th anniversary of the moon landing. I remember as a 12-year-old boy, my father picking me up that morning from Camp Tionesta Boy Scout Summer Camp, driving me home so we could get back in time to watch the broadcast of the moon landing. The USA had such potential to achieve great things that day. We knew we had problems, but the combination of technology and improved policy was going to solve them. We could look forward to a better world and an American society that actually fulfilled the ideals the nation was supposedly founded upon.
Now, almost 60 years later, those hopes have been dashed, and the potential of the once great nation has been squandered. The technology we hoped would improve our lives was hijacked by selfish and evil men who cared not a bit about the political commonwealth, but only about obscenely enriching themselves at the expense of the people who developed and built the technology. The policies that were going to lift Americans up were repudiated viciously by hacks and charlatans who wanted only vengeance for the mere idea of being asked to share the country’s abundance with those who were not of their privileged status ( white men).
We never went back to the moon, although we could and should have. We never accomplished half the exploration we dreamed of, and the evil men were given the power to hurt, not help, the people who worked and suffered in the hope of building a better nation.
The world we dreamed of in 1969 never materialized. Instead, we have a dystopian hellscape, brought upon us ultimately by the stupidity and selfishness of our own people, who allowed themselves to be fed a diet of lies and grievance by those who should have been punished for their evil deeds.
The plight of the average American is worse than it was in that era. But CEO pay has increased over 600x. That is nothing short of obscene and uncalled for.
It wasn’t always like this. In the United States, I trace the great divergence directly back to Ronald Reagan. And the evil men who backed him out of a sense of privilege and grievance at a world that was changing for the better. I think it gets at something very real and very important about the massive shift that’s taken place in America over the past 56 years — “the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.” The oligarchs want it that way because they can’t fathom the idea of sharing the country’s abundance with those who worked to create it. A fundamental philosophy of selfishness was ingrained in our society, rendering us unable to respond forcefully when truly evil men sought to destroy the once-great country that had sent men to the moon.
For them, destroying the earth is good enough, robbing society blind until the final destruction is visited upon us. It’s the tragedy of the 21st century.
The future owed us better. We deserved much better. The resources were there — what we lacked was the national character to achieve it. We became a wretched country with wretched people.
“There are thieves abroad in the land, making off with the blessings of the political commonwealth, and their most basic alibi is that it never existed in the first place. Once we accept that as our true history, the future is pretty much lost.”