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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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We can see injustices of the past, but still honor men who achieved

By David McElroy · July 1, 2020

I was just a little boy when Apollo 11 launched on its way to the moon, but I followed every detail.

The space program had my complete attention. I had just discovered Star Trek and I was completely certain that I would one day follow my heroes — real and fictitious — to the stars.

I watched the launch of Apollo 11 with the rest of the world. We all followed the flight nervously for four days. Late at night on July 20, 1969, I was glued to our television to watch Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon.

I was ecstatic. Next we would fly to Mars. Then to other planets. By the time I grew up, we would move on to conquer outer space. Big things were about to happen. And I would be a part of it.

I recently watched the documentary “Apollo 11,” which used never-before-seen film of the mission. The film was breathtaking to me. It made me really emotional. As I watched these engineers and technicians make this amazing achievement happen, I found myself thinking, “These are my people. These nerds are my tribe. At heart, I’m one of them.”

When I look at this monumental achievement through the lens of 2020 society, it’s immediately clear that these were almost exclusively men and they were almost exclusively white. Opportunities in engineering for women and for blacks were extremely limited compared to what was available to white men.

By the standards of 2020, the people of the space program — and all of the society of 1969 — were sexist and racist.

But nothing about that diminishes the monumental achievement that they were a part of. These were smart and competent people who achieved something that seems almost impossible to me, given the comparatively primitive equipment they were using.

I saw a few black faces and a few women during the documentary, but they were mostly noteworthy for how few they were. Although there’s been an effort fairly recently to document the contributions of bright people in the program who were not white men — the wonderful movie, “Hidden Figures” comes to mind — the truth is that the vast majority of the engineers, technicians and astronauts were white men.

Period. End of story. That’s just the way it happened.

We all know that there were women and there were non-white men — black, Latino, Asian — who would have been part of the effort if they had been given access to education and opportunities at the time. We all know that it was wrong that those people were denied those opportunities. Not only were they diminished, but the society was denied the benefits of their abilities.

Racism and sexism are always terrible things to anyone who cares about fairness and opportunity and competence.

We are living in a period when a lot of people are eager to destroy any honor given to those from the past who don’t share our modern sensibilities about race and sex. By the standards that these reckless people are advancing, we will soon be tearing down the achievements of everybody who believed things that we consider monstrous.

But this is a dangerous standard for evaluating the past. It’s a dangerous standard to use in evaluating the people who achieved things for which they were once honored. By this reckless standard, nobody had any value unless he or she believed what a “woke” person in 2020 believes.

That standard is insane.

I don’t believe in slavishly honoring all those who were honored by their contemporaries or by history. For instance, I believe Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. He shut down newspapers which criticized him. He jailed journalists who disagreed with him. He threatened to jail Supreme Court justices if they ruled against him.

And Lincoln was openly a white supremacist. He didn’t love slavery, but he believed whites were superior to blacks. Read what he said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. If he had lived, his intention had been to send freed black slaves to Africa.

These weren’t the things you were taught about him in your hagiographic history classes, but they’re all true. Lincoln was a fairly typical self-interested politician who pursued power and had no interest in the welfare of slaves.

But he was honored by his contemporaries and he was honored by succeeding generations. I don’t want to tear down the Lincoln Memorial. I’d just like some more honest discussion about that era and who Lincoln was — and what really happened. And why.

I feel the same about the others who some people are so eager to desecrate right now. Whether it’s Christopher Columbus or Woodrow Wilson or Robert E. Lee, their legacies are complicated. They were honored by people of the past for specific reasons — likely not the ones that you’re so eager to assign to them today.

The people of the past were racist and sexist by our standards. Gay people were being imprisoned not that long ago. Most of the people of the past agreed with things that you and I would find barbaric. We’ve known this all along.

It’s madness to suddenly re-write history and to destroy the cultural legacy of a society’s past simply because you want to bring everything into line with your current political or social beliefs. If this is the attitude you adopt, you will never understand how society evolved — and you’ll never comprehend the ways in which it’s going to evolve from where we are right now.

Or do you assume that your beliefs are perfect and that nobody will ever decide in a hundred years that you were wrong about something?

The past needs to be confronted in parts, honored in parts, and tolerated in parts. The men and women of the past weren’t perfect, but they were the ones who had to live through the messy and dangerous days which are slowly giving all of us a better world.

And that’s the real lesson.

If you look at the launch control rooms of a modern rocket launch, you’ll see men and women of all sorts of ethnicities. If you’re smart and competent, you can find an opportunity today. We’re not perfect, but we’ve come a long way in just 50 years.

Watch “Apollo 11” and feel the excitement of a time when we all believed — just for a moment — that we were united in a greater mission to reach for the stars.

It’s a great thing that we’ve opened more opportunities for more people to be part of it, but it’s still appropriate to honor those imperfect people — mostly white men — who made history with that “giant leap for mankind.”

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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