Today we honor the first world space hero, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
Fifty years ago today Yuri Gagarin and the Soviet Union ignited the flame of American fortitude for what appears now to have been the last time... but what a time it was! Alan Shepard chased Gagarin, John Glenn caught him, and Neil Armstrong administered the coup de grace. America was at the peak of her power and influence.
But Vietnam tore us apart, and our government receded into a forty-year morasse of partisan patriotism and capitalistic greed that has eroded the magnificent diversity and resoluteness that once were our strengths.
Fifty years is all it took to bring us to this embarrassing, forlorn point in our history, wasting our time and blood in 2 1/2 endless, fruitless wars, babbling about economics while our infrastructure crumbles, watching a powerful new oligarchy slice away at a vanishing middle class.
Is there world enough and time left for us, or have we ceded the 21st century and beyond to another hemisphere? We'll see soon enough.
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