An Anniversary Celebration
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On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union orbited the first artificial earth satellite, called "Sputnik". This unexpected event galvanized the United States into launching a massive campaign to improve education and technological capability to "beat the Russians" in a race to land a man on the moon. Under the leadership of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, Americans were walking on the moon on July 21, 1969, less than 12 years later. The US manned space program produced millions of high-paying jobs and several hundred billion dollars of revenue and new technology. It transformed the civilization of the entire world!
Today, thanks to the shortsightedness of the present and past administrations, Those jobs and revenue and the lifestyle they produced are all gone. The Saturn V rockets, the mightiest ever devised, are lawn ornaments. They sit rotting in the sun and rain, one not sixty miles from where I sit. The most sophisticated spacecraft ever built, the Space Shuttles, are museum displays. Both are testaments to the greatness that was once the United States of America, and the cesspool of degradation into which we have allowed ourselves to sink as a result of subsidizing two generations of Americans to be ignorant, lazy, irresponsible, hopeless, homeless, and unemployed. Now, if Americans want to go into space, they must grovel, hat in hand, to Russia, the Sputnik launchers, along with plenty of United States dollars that will never, ever return. We wanted to show the superiority of capitalism over communism, and we did that. Unfortunately, now we are the communists.
We had our last chance to vote for renewed greatness or perpetual mediocrity, and we chose the latter. The 2012 election demonstrated to the entire world what we have become. We had the opportunity to choose whether we are a nation of aspiring, energized overachievers, a society of self-reliant contributors to human destiny and producers of wonders, or a nation of mean, petty, self-serving cynics, sloths, and complacents, a society of struggling folks who are barely making it every day, consumers who are just jammed up, without resources, without hope and without honor among the modern peoples of the world. Now, we will surely reap what we have sown. May God help us all!
One hears talk today about "going to Mars." But it's all talk. The US can't even reproduce Alan Shepard's first flight today. What we need is a little less talk and a lot more action! Personally, I'd like to see us shoot for Enceladus. That seems a fitting goal for the greatness that was once the United States. On the other hand, we can keep going the we way we are and hope that a miracle happens. Unfortunately, the audacity of hope is a poor substitute for the wisdom of experience. We have plenty of the latter.
We reelected the party that got us into this mess. We will deserve everything we get. People can blame "the government" all they want, but WE are the people, and WE voted them into office!