Gratitude Monday: Comfort where I find it

On the day we as a nation celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m focusing on some of the remarkable achievements of the United States of America that have occurred in my lifetime. Some of the ones with special meaning for me:

The Space Program. It started out as the Space Race, us against the Soviets, and they won the first few heats. But oh, when we put our minds—our very best minds—to it, we soared. Viz.:

The Mercury Seven—our space pioneers. I’ll give you John Glenn’s first trip, on 20 February 1962, since we so recently lost him:

1969: Apollo II, first landing on the moon. Neil Armstrong took that giant leap on 20 July, followed by Buzz Aldrin. I watched it in Champaign, Ill., with my friend Gretchen Pullen’s family. Look at Armstrong just hopping around like an eight-year-old:

Taking a giant step of a different sort, Richard M. Nixon took a blowtorch to the ice block of our relations with China, and within a few years of entering office, he was entering the People’s Republic. Literally.

But Nixon’s hubris grew as though on steroids, and it was the now-vilified main-stream media, including the New York Times’s disclosure of the Pentagon Papers and the stellar work of the Washington Post, digging into the Watergate scandal. From publisher Katharine Graham down to newbie reporter Bob Woodward, the Post uncovered corruption and crimes on a scale we’d thought could never be replicated. They uncovered it, verified it in accordance with high journalistic standards, and they published it, in the face of intimidation from high-ranking Administration officials. Including Attorney General John Mitchell.

Yes, that’s right: our chief legal officer was not only in on the crimes, he threatened those who brought them to light. Plus ça change…

[From left, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee. Photo by Washington Post]

It gave me hope that, no matter how far off track we got, we could right our course and continue to move forward.

We’ve had some amazing song writers during my lifetime. I’ll just sum them up with Bob Dylan and give you something that was true in 1964 when he wrote it and sure as hell is true again now.

Here’s Tracy Chapman singing it at his 30^th Anniversary Concert:

In the cinematic arts we’ve had a shedload of brilliant filmmakers. These are among my favorites: Coppola, Coppola, Spielberg, Hill, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Howard, Lee.

And we made—for a while—astonishing progress toward equality for all in this shining city upon a hill: striking down the policies of separate-but-equal; don’t ask, don’t tell; and governmental intrusion into the reproductive rights of women.

All of this may have culminated in the election, in 2008, and reelection, in 2012, of the first African-American man to the Presidency.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, of the week that will see the installation of the antithesis of all these achievements—the Kleptocrat and his appointed administration, abetted by Repugnant majorities in both Houses of Congress. So I’m holding on to these things that I witnessed in my lifetime. We were good, once. I hope we can return to goodness once again.