I think of this blog as a way to trot out ideas for writing. The informality of it, with the prospect for some sort of responses is very attractive.
I used to wish that my typewriter could talk back to me, and now it does.
The general question I am exploring is about what can one do to get a handle of what is really going on with politics in our time, in a deeper sense, and what can be learned from the past decades that might inform a progressive approach to building a future that is better than the one that we see envisioned in the Mad Max movies. I find that this is not easy, but on the other hand, it seems like a necessary thing to attempt.
So, here is an essay, prompted by a PBS documentary.
Perhaps it is the full moon eclipse scintillating brain cells...
The other night PBS ran a documentary that reviewed the origins of NASA and the first attempts at getting the engineering together to produce capability for putting space flights together. One minute you would see a string of spectacular disasters as rockets turned into fireballs as they were lifting off. The next minute you would see crowds of people watching as a rocket with an astronaut at the top was counted down.
Would it work or would it explode? What is really bold, looking back, is that Kennedy pronounced the moon landing objective with only twenty minutes of time in space to NASA's credit.
Seeing this period reduced to a summary underscored how extremely dangerous this was, and the courage of the astronauts. The fact that there was a national sense of urgency to do this also underscored what a different time that was.
Where did the absolutely unquestioned confidence come from? People went at this all full of smiles and with the sense of this being kind of a national party, especially when something went off well. Amazingly, there were a whole string of successes which added to the sense of near euphoria of that time. We felt we could do anything.
Sure, gas was incredibly cheap. Those who had fought and survived WWII were young, like President Kennedy. The wartime economy had successfully been converted into a marvel of endless new cars, washing machines, and toys. But there was really something deeper that connected one to American ancestors who built the small towns and manufacturing businesses and comfortable middle class lifestyle out of their aspirations and toughness of spirit. Going to the moon was a barn raising.
I remember how it all felt. And there is such a contrast with now. NASA was an unquestioned expression of purpose that was concerted and united. There wasn’t a lot of people saying that this should be left up to private enterprise because we shouldn’t have to contribute to a collective purpose like that, since it is so expensive. Tax payers – including the rich – were supporting a national initiative that involved huge risk.
What kept it together of course, was that so soon after World War II, the threat of communism and Russia was really intense in people’s minds. When Lyndon Johnson said that Americans didn’t want to go to bed by the light of a communist moon, he shut down the naysayers.
But even so. This was an era which saw the development of the interstate highway system, the computerization of a national air traffic control system, and many other infrastructures necessitated by a population that began to top 200 million.
The reaction to all of that is what remains. Reagan and Goldwater began to politically champion the right wing drive against a national will aimed at things that were not war or Pentagon spending. They convinced the right that on moral grounds, America was going wrong because of the advent of birth control, civil rights legislation, and the rise of the peace movement on top of the War on Poverty.
Under the rubric of “smaller government” what is really meant is the dominance of the individual who secedes from community responsibility and any enthusiasm that might be expressed about what can be achieved through pooling the resources of a large society to produce change against historic human limitations and tragedy.
Perhaps without the threat of Nuclear War with Russia there never could have been any large scale enterprise that focused the capability of the whole American culture. Perhaps now, with questions looming about global concerns like globalization or climate change and resource sustainability, the deeper true issue is whether the whole notion of a nation that pools its resources, including its brain power, and concentrates focus to any objective - brings the way human kind has evolved and will evolve onto the table.
Perhaps our real and true issue is about how to think about future evolution.
To me, it seems that there are those who fear that we are moving too fast towards a destiny in which all of us will have to be more conscious of the human race as an entity which requires of us that we intellectually have to contribute energy. The problem with issues that are planetary in scale is that the human race has never been organized in order to address them.
We sort of bridle at the thought because these tend to come with massive complexity which we would rather avoid.
If you look at the pictures of the earth from outer space, you get a sense of the need to address global issues, but if you look at things from a local perspective, ignoring the implications of those images, you think about it all from amidst a welter of confusing details that you would rather not be bothered with.
So, in effect, what is impinging on us and irritating us is that we are being prodded by the nature of our reality into assuming greater conscious effort at taking on some responsibility for evolution on purpose. Most likely, the challenges of the 21st and 22nd centuries will accrue to the development, for the first time in the history of the human race, of conscious evolution.
The political questions of our time are evidently about that anyway.
Why should the dominant voices in the debate be those of fear for the future?
This might seem esoteric. But the right wing is looking at the big picture through a lens that colors all the issues. They are mobilizing large groups of voters for propositions that seem persuasive to some on the basis that the individual is what is addressed in the Constitution, not the collective (even though they paradoxically support corporatism through the rubric of free enterpise). This is aimed at melting away the glue that binds people into common action against the larger problems where the special interests are hoping to continue operating unobserved.
Globalization is a huge duck blind that the larger banks and profit centers hope to continue working within as a whole field of action that is obscured from view. The profits are not in the millions, nor are they in the billions. Investments and profits instead are in the trillions of dollars. This is so beyond what we tend to know about that we don’t usually concern ourselves with what is going on – with our dollars.
But this is the arena in which issues like global climate change, resource sustainability, population control, and the equitable distribution of wages and wealth have to be debated. This debate is not entertained within the media, which should be obvious, but is through lesser proxy issues. However, this debate will continue.
The need to engage with this issue may be a general urgency that brought about the internet, which through the coming century will certainly facilitate it.