Any Country That Can’t Put a Man on The Moon . . .

            It has been said that every American over the age of fifty can tell you exactly where they were at three moments in their life.  First, they remember where they were on September 11, 2001, when they heard that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center.

            Second, they vividly recall where they were on November 22, 1963, when the news came that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

            And they can tell you exactly where they were on July 20, 1969, when Neal Armstrong took his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

            I remember exactly where I was when Neal Armstrong first walked on the moon.  I was seventeen years old, a rising high school senior, and a student in a summer program at Northwestern University.  On one of the most memorable days of my life, I sat in the lobby of my dorm at Northwestern, my eyes fixed on a black and white TV set.  I remember Walter Cronkite describing the events of those last few exciting seconds as Apollo 11 descended to the lunar surface.  I remember hearing Armstrong, in his best Chuck Yeager voice, calmly announce, “The Eagle has landed.”

            And I remember watching Armstrong plant the American flag on the moon.

            It was a moment I had waited for for years.  You see, I had grown up with the American space program.  When I was in the third grade, I had pictures of all seven Mercury Astronauts on my bedroom wall.  I could recite their names like the starting lineup of a baseball team:  Shepard, Grissom, Cooper, Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra and Slayton.  The “Mercury 7” was a great team that was going to beat the Russians!

            When I was in the fourth grade, I sat in Mrs. Gillespie’s class at Frayser Elementary School and watched Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn blast into orbit on Friendship 7.

            Thereafter, I anxiously followed the orbital flights of Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra and “Gordo” Cooper, as America raced toward the moon

            And so on that July day in 1969, as I sat in the dorm lobby at Northwestern, I was watching a dream come true.  We Americans had done exactly what the late President Kennedy had said we were going to do by the end of the decade of the 1960’s.  We had put a man on the moon.  Two of them, actually.

            The following spring, during my last few weeks of high school, I watched anxiously as Apollo 13 limped its way back from the moon.  When that wounded spacecraft splashed safely in the Pacific Ocean, I was thrilled by the mission that was called “a successful failure.”

In the aftermath of Apollo 11, and even after the successful failure of Apollo 13, there was a phrase we Americans began to use.  It went like this:  Any country that can put a man on the moon . . . And you would then fill in the rest of the phrase by saying what such a great country could do.

            Any country that can put a man on the moon can find a cure for cancer.

            Any country that can put a man on the moon can end poverty.            Any country that can put a man on the moon can build an electric car!            And so on.  It was a can-do statement used by politicians and preachers and school teachers.  And we Americans really believed it.  We may have been mired in an endless war in Southeast Asia.  There may have been riots in our inner cities.  But there was always that spirit of optimism that was inspired on the day we saw Neal Armstrong walk on the moon.  Any country that can  put a man on the moon can . . .

            I thought about that innocent, can-do time earlier this week when I read the news that President Obama announced that it was time for NASA to discontinue all plans for further manned missions to the moon.  It was one small step for the President, and one giant leap toward deficit reduction.

            We apparently can no longer afford a manned or womaned mission to the moon.  We can bail out Wall Street, but we can’t bail out Cape Canaveral.

I voted for President Obama.  I am still pulling for him, even with all of the signs that he may be the second coming of Jimmy Carter.  And I realize that with a projected budget deficit of $1.3 trillion for this year alone, some things – actually a lot of things – have to be cut.  But, Houston, we’ve got a problem.  Somewhere between Apollo 13 and the 2008 stock market crash, we Americans have lost our can-do spirit.  Maybe it was the Challenger explosion.  Maybe it was 9/11.  I don’t know, but somehow we Americans no longer believe that we can do great things.  We have replaced Neal Armstrong and Sally Ride with Rush Limbaugh and Nancy Pelosi.  We no longer have the right stuff.

We are now a country that can’t put a man on the moon.  And any country that can’t put a man on the moon, can’t build a great public school system.

            Any country that can’t put a man on the moon can’t break its dependency on Mid-East oil.

            Any country that can’t put a man on the moon can’t balance the federal budget.

            But in my 57 year old heart, I am still that little boy that sat in Mrs. Gillespie’s classroom nearly a half century ago, wishing Godspeed to John Glenn as he blasted into space, and dreaming that I would some day see an American walk on the moon.  That dream came true on July 20, 1969.  But now that dream is just a memory of a time when we Americans believed that even the sky was not the limit.

            I still want to believe that America can put a man or a woman on the moon.  After all, any country that can put a man on the moon . . .