Fly Me To The Moon

By: Vince Yanez

In the 1480’s, Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized how a helicopter would work, it took 300 years before someone was able to actually build one. Jules Verne, in 1865, put humans in a rocket and sent them to the moon; it took us 100 years to catch up. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. talked about a day when black and white could see each other as equals. 47 years later, well, just turn on our television and see how far we haven’t come.

When I was a young lad, if you had asked me what the world would look like in 2010, I would have said we would all be flying around in cars, using jet-packs, our meals would be pills and we would be able to read each other’s thoughts.  I would have said, by 2010, we would have figured out time travel and movie theaters would have smell-o-vision. Buck Rogers and the 21^st Century showed us we’d be hanging out with robots, wearing silver clothes, shooting lasers and flirting with aliens from other worlds. 2010 was a long ways away.

I wonder, in 1963, if you had asked those people on the steps of the Lincoln memorial if we’d ever have an African-American president, would they have laughed at you or would they have said, ‘Maybe?’ If you asked a Vietnam Veteran in the late 70’s, ‘would the American people ever allow the government to put our men and women in harm’s way without a plan or exit strategy?’ Would they have laughed at you or would they have said, ‘Maybe?’

If you were told, back in 1983, 1995 or even in 2001, that we would still be hearing racist remarks shouted from the pulpit, a news organization, a political movement, the mayor of a New York town or the legislature of a Southwestern state, would you have thought ‘No, not our America, not that far into the future’, or would you have thought, ‘Maybe?’

I am naïve. I live in a country that put a man on the moon, builds nuclear submarines, invented the internet and eradicated polio. I assumed we would be using flying cars and jetpacks by now. I would have thought, in the 21^st Century, an African-American president would be no big deal (or a woman or a homosexual). I would have figured that by 2010 we would have realized the strength of our Republic lies not in its military might, but in educating its citizens, and in my optimistic-youth, I would have imagined that we would have gotten past the ignorance, fear and hate known as our Racism Problem in America.

It appears I was wrong on all counts.