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.”

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts