According to the network news broadcasts, some 650 million people around the world watched the moon landing in 1969 and were “united” by the success of the Apollo 11 team. I had a different experience of those events. Although the mission seemed wondrous at the time, what else was happening that year made the event seem almost peripheral to me.
Now, 50 years later, possibly because I worked for more than 20 years as a senior editor for an online encyclopedia, I have become a news junkie. But my husband has gotten used to how I watch and listen to the news. I often turn off the sound of political blather and sometimes even reports of the latest story in our chaotic political landscape. I turn the sound off not because I am uninterested. It is because it upsets me too much, and I need to gather strength and let time pass so that I can go back and subject myself to what is happening in this country.
In fact, in some ways I respond to news events and their coverage more than I did during the 60s. This may be because I am older, and seeing what is happening to the planet and the people on it is not diluted by work or school or social life or self-exploration. I value still being able to feel anger.
Back in 1969 I was busy going to classes and working — I was a senior at a large university — but I also think that by then the events of the last half of the 1960s — one of the most dramatic and tumultuous decades in U.S. history — made me numb. The moonwalk involved no deaths, so no mourning. I remember feeling then that it was strange that there were parades and excitement for anything newsworthy, after feeling dread every time I read or watched the news. I was far from alone. By 1969 it was easy to be depleted by the often violent events of our changing country. Disasters could barely penetrate the emotional shells we developed after years of shocks.
When I started college in 1966 the world was very different. There were curfews and dress codes at colleges and universities. We couldn’t have boys in our room unless the door was partly open, and we had to wear skirts unless the temperature was below 32f. Fraternity parties were de rigueur, and alcohol was the abuse of choice. But by the end of the school year I remember spraying deodorant to block the smell of marijuana in our dorm room. Superficial things like clothing and hair styles changed, but then, inexorably, so did the bigger picture. Some of my fellow students overdosed, some dropped out of school, some were so blasted by the possibility that they would be drafted that they hurt themselves badly. There were marches and protests, sit-ins and teach-ins. Many of my fellow students changed career choices, living arrangements, and life goals because of their response to the political terrain.
Top photo: Neil Armstrong on the moon, July 20, 1969
My cohort was still in high school was President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. I remember being onstage during a choir program when our principal announced that he was dead. Students and teachers started screaming and crying, and parents came from home to pick up their children. It was a huge and overwhelming disaster in our lives. Within the next few years, events that seemed unimaginable continued.
A year after the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Malcolm X was assassinated. By 1965 there were 25,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and antiwar marches were roiling campuses and communities. As the Vietnam War raged, events at home also turned destructive.
My family lived on the border of Newark, N.J., and the riots during the summer of 1967 affected the lives of many in all the communities in and around Newark — shootings, fires, lootings, killings, and police and armed force response. Newark has fought to rebuild itself after the conflagration, but it still bears the destructive marks of what happened there more than 50 years ago. Someone asked online about what we baby boomers remembered about that time, and comments flooded in. Whether my cohort remembered the Newark riots more than the moon walk is debatable, but it has certainly embedded in our memories since then.
The year of 1968 was the nadir: in March of 1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not run again for president. The following month Bobby Kennedy announced the assassination of Martin Luther King. Just a few months later Kennedy was also killed. A feeling of inevitability mixed with our shock. We watched the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Hue (1968) on television, and that summer we watched the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago fall into fighting and disarray. Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency, and many of us continued to march against the Vietnam War and for women’s rights and pro-choice. The following year was a series of extremes: from watching the My Lai massacre and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia to being a part of or wanting to be a part of the giant celebration of Woodstock.
Marches and protests — like those at Kent State — began to move towards violence. The nation watched as four unarmed students were killed and others injured by the Ohio National Guard. “Woodstock West,” what some called the concert at Altamont in northern California, degenerated into violence when a young African American man was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels. Some considered the concert at Altamont to be the end of the 1960s. The year after Altamont, in 1970, my university cancelled our class’s graduation because of bomb threats.
According to a Pew Research Center poll, the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 is the historic event that most people think had the greatest impact on the United States. Both John F. Kennedy’s assassination (#4) and the Vietnam War (#5) had greater impacts on the lives of Americans than did the Moon landing (#7), so perhaps I was not the only one who found the first steps on the moon less significant than were other events happening in this country.
Fifty years have passed since the Moon landing. Would I be more interested if it happened today? I did actually go to New York City for the parade in honor of the U.S. Women’s soccer team several weeks ago and was thrilled when the players passed. I do respond to emotional stories of people helping immigrants and banding together to support those who are needy. I try to contribute and write and march still, but I have my own feelings – as do we all – about what is most important to the planet and to our loved ones. As long as it is not politicized (please please), I will celebrate the next event that might unite us in wonder and hope, whether a Mars mission or a medical breakthrough. We need good news, and thankfully I am still able to feel wonder – and not just anger.