In the nearly four years that we’ve been traveling and house sitting, we’ve been fortunate to drive across the country – ocean to ocean – five times.  Each time we do – particularly when we’re crossing east to west — we find ourselves thinking and talking constantly about the people who settled the west during the middle of the nineteenth century.  How could they have possibly done it?  You put your meager belongings in a wagon, hitch two horses to it, and start walking west.  There are no roads or trails.  No bridges across rivers or tunnels through mountains.  You don’t know if you’ll find water for yourself and your horses, or anything more to eat than what you brought with you when you started out weeks ago.  If you get sick or fall and break your leg, there’s no medical care.  And when you got to wherever you thought you were going, there was no job waiting for you, no stores in which to buy the things you needed, no house to move into.  You had to create everything for yourself from nothing.  When we last crossed the country, we dodged thunderstorms, hailstorms, floods, and tornadoes.  People crossing in wagons didn’t have weather forecasts or maps.  They got up every morning, turned their backs to the rising sun, and walked west into the storm.

The two of us are the kind of people who will give away everything, leave our friends and families, and just go – headed for what looks like an adventure in South Africa or the U.S.  Had we been alive in the 1840’s or 1850’s, we’re the kind of people who would have headed west toward the frontier and beyond.  But we couldn’t have done it.  We don’t have that kind of courage and toughness.  The ordeal would have killed us before we reached St. Louis.  We can’t go anywhere without our GPS and the knowledge that there’s a Starbucks at the next exit off the interstate.  Do you know anyone today who is capable of doing what Americans did in the 1840’s and 1850’s?  The American west was settled by a breed of American who no longer exists.

In June last year, we celebrated the 75^th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.  There were plenty of essays and documentaries to give you some sense of what that day was like.  Thousands of American boys – some with bone spurs — poured out of landing crafts onto Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast and were killed before they got out of the water.  Those who made it across the beach had to scale steep cliffs to get to the German machine gunners who were raking the beach below.  The night before, other boys parachuted into Normandy behind the beaches in the darkness.  (The airplane had only recently been invented and no one had ever before parachuted into combat – at night.)  There had been the leadership stupidity and horrors of Anzio before that, while the unimaginable nightmares of Bastogne and Chenogne during the Battle of the Bulge lay ahead.  Who were these kids who did these things?  Do you know anyone today who is capable of doing what those G.I.s did in 1944?  Can you name a single national leader who today could marshal the same national purpose and will that it took to win World War II?

Those boys who died on European beaches and fields ended fascism in Europe and paved the way for the country we are today:  A nation with our own authoritarian leader trampling norms, values, ideals, rights, and freedoms while introducing fascism in our country.

A few weeks later in July 2019 was the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.  The number of television shows, documentaries, and essays commemorating that event that we stumbled on was almost too much, but we watched and read our share.  We found it almost beyond comprehension.  We kept watching and re-watching the launch feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of what we were seeing.  “We’ve passed 80 seconds.  We’ll go on full internal power at 50 seconds in the countdown.  .  .  .  We’re still go for the launch of Apollo 11.  .  .  .  We’re under thirty seconds.  .  .  .  T minus 16.  15.  Guidance is internal.  13.  12.  11.  10.  9.  Ignition sequence start.  7.  6.  .  .  .”  Jesus.  These people are going to the moon.  The engineers at Mission Control, in their short-sleeve white shirts and black ties, are sitting at consoles with cans of RC Cola and slide rules in front of them.  The lunar lander looks like something slapped together from pieces of wood and aluminum foil for a middle school science fair project.  That’s not stopping them.  They’re about to leave this world for another.  Who are these people?  The kind of people Americans used to be.

Can you imagine the America of today launching any sort of project of this scale that is both at the very limits of our technological capabilities and the boundaries of human courage?  Can you name a single national leader who today could marshal the same national purpose and will that it took to send men to the moon “and return them safely to earth” in 1969?

When I was a kid growing up in Alexandria, across the Potomac from me John Kennedy (“We choose to go to the moon  .  .  .”) was in the White House, Earl Warren was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and lions like William Fulbright and Everett Dirksen roamed the Senate.  These were giants.  Today in their places we find dunces, midgets, pygmies.