Essay: OF REVOLUTION AND THE MOON

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It was a year of revolutionaries—or would-be revolutionaries. Students and militants, black and white, neophyte radicals and New Leftists raised fists and hurled stones at the old order. The system must be destroyed; the Establishment must be laid low. Obscenities mingled with tear gas in Chicago. Black Panthers roamed the streets of Oakland. With a sense of deja-vu—of old, familiar furniture being dusted off—barricades once again surrounded the University of Paris. There were no programs, or few of them, for the future; there was only rage against the present. If the rage was often justified, the results of these revolutionary attempts (sometimes mere games) were doubtful. Here and there they did shake the established powers and did produce the beginning of reforms—although reform was not their stated aim. Predictably, they also provoked resistance and reaction, only entrenching the forces under attack. As the year ended, a different sort of revolution suddenly forced itself into the world's imagination. It was represented by the flight around the moon—perhaps the only event of the year to which, in the devalued coinage of the language, the word revolutionary might still be properly applied.

Incalculable Consequences

On the face of it, the space flight had little pertinence to the problems, the agonies of earth. It was possible to look at the moon over a Harlem or Watts rooftop and feel only bitterness at the money spent, the vast effort made, in a cause that would not alter a single life, a single dwelling in the ghetto. And yet the event was really incalculable in its consequences. Nothing comparable has happened in man's history, except possibly the great ocean voyages that led to the discovery of the New World —and to the transformation of Western man. In Columbus's day, as German Author Joachim Leithauser has pointed out, mankind believed itself to be in its old age, destined for poverty, sickness and evil. The famous Nurnberg Chronicle of 1493 predicted: "Conditions will be so terrible that no man will be able to lead a decent life. Then will all the sorrows of the Apocalypse pour down upon mankind: Flood, Earthquake, Pestilence and Famine; neither shall the crops grow nor the fruits ripen; the wells will dry up and the waters will bear upon them blood and bitterness, so that the birds of the air, the beasts in the field, and the fishes in the sea will all perish."

But the prophecy was false. What followed for mankind was not the Apocalypse, though there was to be abundant blood and bitterness. What followed was a tremendous resurgence of mind and spirit, a vast expansion of human knowledge and power, indeed a great age of reason.