Reflections on a half-century

Lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin looks at the lunar lander during the historic Apollo 11 moonwalk. Aldrin had just deployed the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package. In the foreground is the Passive Seismic Experiment Package; beyond it is the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector (LR-3). The photograph was taken by the mission commander, Neil Armstrong.

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 22, 2021

This week, the Milwaukee Bucks won the National Basketball Association championship. It was the team’s second, having won the title in 1971.

The Bucks swept the Baltimore Bullets — now the Washington Wizards — in a four-game series at the end of April that year. As it happens, the games took place roughly halfway between the third and fourth Apollo moon landings. Apollo 14 touched down on Feb. 5, while Apollo 15 descended to the surface on July 30. The sixth and final successful mission, Apollo 17, would land in December 1972.

When I grew up, Apollo represented humanity’s pinnacle of technological achievement, the most daring exploration in history. It never would have occurred to me that nearly five decades would pass without any further crewed missions to the moon or Mars.

Despite our lack of progress expanding into the final frontier, our species has made tremendous strides when it comes to building sophisticated gadgets. The first home computer, the Scelbi-8H, went on sale in March 1974. It had 1 kilobyte of random-access memory and could be assembled from a kit for around $500. Fitted with the maximum 16KB of RAM, the Scelbi’s cost approached $3,000.

Today, $500 will get American consumers a low-end cellular smart phone with abilities that would blow even the high-end Scelbi to bits. Not only are smart phones portable, they can network wirelessly to make phone calls, play video and sound, and share and receive data of almost any kind. Thanks to the Internet, nearly any fact one cares to search for can be uncovered by a person with a phone, cell reception and a data plan. Modern phones are also capable of recording and transmitting sounds and images, providing drivers with step-by-step on-the-go directions that adjust for traffic, and, when paired with a valid credit card or monetary account, ordering a nearly infinite array of goods.

While it may be an exaggeration to say that a phone allows an ordinary person to carry around a supercomputer and a movie (or radio or television) studio in her pocket, it is not much of one. In 1971, you could buy a portable television — some of which, again, could be assembled from kits — for less than $200. But you couldn’t use it to take pictures or communicate with anyone else.

Here’s the general sense that I had as a child, not long after Milwaukee topped the world of American professional basketball: Life was good, life was getting better all the time, and life would likely continue to improve for the indefinite future. As long as humans didn’t kill ourselves off with an exchange of nuclear missiles, get conquered by aliens or catch some unlucky break, like being exterminated by a giant asteroid or ravaged by a deadly disease, our species was on an upward path. This rosy view of the universe was informed by my existence as a white male in a financially secure upper-middle-class suburban home in a wealthy and powerful nation.

The truth, of course, is that life wasn’t good for everyone. If you lack money, your health, happiness and life are subject to tremendous instability. Women and girls are the targets of sexism, harassment and assault at higher rates than men and boys; in many sectors of the work force, they are also promoted and compensated at significantly lower rates than men. Black and brown and indigenous and Asian people are more likely to suffer prejudice than white people. (Note: It will be a reversal, not a victory, if we reach a time when white people suffer more prejudice than people of color.) Cisgender heterosexuals are discriminated against far less than lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.

All of these things were true in 1971; all are true today. We have made some improvements, but we have a long, long way to go.

In some ways, it feels as if the United States has lost ground from where it was when the Bucks won their first NBA title. The nation has long had a two-party political system, but the political landscape seems far more polarized than it did five decades ago. Gallup surveyed Americans on their confidence in major American institutions biennually from 1973 until 1983, at which point polling on the topic was done annually. Consider these results:

• Percentages reporting a great deal/quite a lot/some confidence in Congress:

1973: 77

2021: 49

Difference: Minus-28 percentage points

• A great deal/quite a lot/some confidence in the presidency:

1973: 81

2021: 67

Difference: Minus-14 percentage points

Confidence in the Supreme Court actually grew slightly, from 73 percent when the survey started to 78 percent this year. Americans have also become somewhat more confident in the criminal justice system but somewhat less confident in the police, both of which Gallup added to the poll in 1993. Faith in the former stands at 58 percent today, up from 55; faith in the latter dipped from 87 to 83.

Unfortunately, confidence in institutions in 2021 is frequently influenced by political beliefs. Although only slightly more Republicans and Republican “leaners” have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the criminal justice system than Democrats and Democratic leaners, 20 percent to 19 percent, 76 percent of Republicans who were surveyed have high levels of confidence in the police as opposed to just 31 percent of Democrats.

There are modest splits over the Supreme Court, which 39 percent of Republicans think highly of as compared to 35 percent of Democrats, and Congress, in which 17 percent of Democrats expressed confidence as opposed to just 7 percent of Republicans. The biggest split of all concerns the presidency, with 62 percent of Democrats feel significant confidence in against only 13 percent of Republicans.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results for this question flipped from when Americans were surveyed on this topic a year ago. Back then, a whopping 83 percent of Republicans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the presidency, while just 16 percent of Democrats shared that opinion. (See page 17 of this document.)

The sudden flipflop would be comical if we didn’t know that on Jan. 6, 2011, some Republican sympathizers seemed prepared to take hostages or do even worse to prevent a legitimate election winner from taking office. After a very brief period in which several prominent Republicans — perhaps shaken by hearing gunshots in the Capitol and being hurriedly evacuated by police — condemned the Trump/Hawley/Cruz insurrection, most party leaders now seem content to let the event fade from memory.

When the House of Representatives approved the creation of a select committee to investigate the riot by a 220-190 vote on June 30, Democrats won the support of only two Republicans. In the Senate, where each party caucus has 50 members, four Republicans supported a similar bill authorizing an investigation. Because Senate minorities can invoke a filibuster rule, raising the requirement to pass legislation to at least 60 votes in favor, the effort failed.

Meanwhile, grassroots Republicans profess the belief that voter fraud influenced the 2020 presidential election. This idea persists even though no evidence of substantial misconduct has arisen, despite numerous recounts and audits. According to a new CBS News poll, 69 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of Trump voters say that there was widespread fraud last year. According to the network, “Trump voters who report regularly watching conservative leaning cable channels, like FOX News, [One America News Network], or Newsmax, are particularly likely to claim fraud. Eight in 10 in this group say voter fraud was widespread, compared to two-thirds of other Trump voters.”

Republican-controlled state legislatures are exploiting this warped view of reality by passing a raft of laws in 2021 that will make it harder to vote. Often, the burden will fall heaviest on minority voters, who tend to prefer Democratic candidates. In some cases, the new laws do more than simply target individuals who lack government-issued picture identification or people who wish to vote by mail; they also raise the specter of potential punishment for election officials who try to help members of the public cast ballots or act in ways that might displease a Republican-dominated state elections board.

In many ways, this is the best time in history to be alive, at least for many residents of wealthy nations. We have plenty of nifty gadgets, information and entertainment is readily available, and modern medicine is capable of healing grievous injuries and fending off deadly illnesses. But here in the United States, I sense that millions of citizens, particularly on the far right, are ready to abandon or destroy fundamental parts of our political system.

I fear that radical action of some sort is inevitable and may occur as soon as the 2024 presidential election. Should this scenario come to pass, one of the greatest nations in history could be caught in an irreversible cycle of self-destruction and decay.

I hope I’m wrong.