Organizing and Measuring
By Albert B. Kelly
As we made our way through 2019, the year was dotted with
all manner of retrospectives on NASA, Apollo 11, and the moon landing. Part of
this look over our collective shoulder included looking back at the early
1960’s and the start of the space race during the Kennedy administration.
Almost all the fiftieth anniversary pieces featured a clip of President John F.
Kennedy announcing to Congress that we would seek to land a man on the moon and
return him safely to earth before the decade was over.
The other iconic clip was Kennedy’s moon speech at Rice
Stadium in Houston. The day was September 12, 1962 and on that Wednesday
afternoon, President Kennedy spoke about accomplishing something we didn’t know
how to do or even where to begin. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Today,
the moon landing seems like it was inevitable- something of a forgone
conclusion, certainly no big deal technically, yet from the vantage point of
1962, the task was impossible.
After hearing short snippets of Kennedy’s moon speech
several times over the summer for various anniversary shows, I finally took the
time to listen to the speech in its entirety. There is much in that speech to
inspire and I could easily imagine adults at the time responding to the
challenges set forth by Kennedy that day. Yet, listening in 2019 some fifty years
later, you can’t help but notice what is lacking today in terms of national purpose.
I say that because while it is true that Kennedy spoke of going
to the moon precisely because the challenge was hard and not easy, those were
not the words that caught my attention. The idea that stuck with me in contrast
with today was the one that suggested that landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to earth would be a goal that would “serve to organize and
measure the best of our energies and skills”.
I think about how we are today and I wonder what it is that might
serve to “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills” in 2020 and
beyond. For sheer size and scope, I end up on global warming and climate change-
how it will impact our children’s children and I ponder what virtually every
scientist says will happen when average global temps increase several degrees
Celsius and when I do, suddenly lowering carbon emissions and greenhouse gases in
a serious way seems like a damned good way to organize and measure the best of
our energies and skills.
Yet as a nation we do next to nothing to lead on this generational
and global catastrophe-in-the-making because supposedly there’s a “lack of
consensus” about the science- whatever that looks like. Consider that when
Kennedy committed us to the moon landing, the amount of stuff scientists didn’t
know about in terms of space travel and the moon was staggering. We’re not
talking “lack of consensus” in 1962; we’re talking complete ignorance, yet we moved
forward anyway.
On a side note, what’s happening today with global warming
and climate science reminds me of the nonsense the tobacco industry was
peddling back in Kennedy’s day to keep profits up. Doctors had pretty much connected
the dots on smoking and cancer, yet the tobacco guys kept saying they needed
more evidence. More recently that same dance was used by the NFL when it came to
CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) and concussions even though deceased NFL
players showed CTE in 110 out of 111 autopsies. But they need more evidence. Go
figure.
If it’s not leading on global warming and the consequences
of a warmer planet, then what things might we tackle as a society in the next decade,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard? What goals might serve to
organize and measure the best of our energies and skills? What challenges are
we willing to accept and what challenges are we unwilling to postpone?
Maybe more important than what we choose to take up as a
nation is knowing which voice, if any, has the ability to capture and frame the
current moment and use words to inspire us rather than incite us. A little less
than a year from now, we’ll have an opportunity to once again make some choices
about whom and what, in Kennedy’s words “will serve to organize and measure the
best of our energies and skills”.