52 years after the moon landing, Republicans reject science and America is unraveling

[Nevilledog]

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Will Bunch
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Tuesday marks the 52nd anniversary of the first moonwalk -- amid a GOP-driven complete meltdown in Americans' shared faith in science, leading to a new wave of COVID-19 hospitalizations, climate denial and more

What created this giant mess? My new column

52 years after the moon landing, Republicans reject science and America is unraveling | Will Bunch
A poll on the 52nd anniversary of the moon landing shows a majority of Republicans now reject science, sparking a COVID-19 comeback.
inquirer.com
9:28 AM · Jul 18, 2021

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/1969-moon-landing-republicans-now-reject-science-20210718.html

There is no Democratic or Republican way to land on the moon.

I was 10 years old on the Sunday afternoon of July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 made its more-hairy-than-we-realized touchdown on the lunar surface and Neil Armstrong famously said, “The Eagle has landed.” Even at the tail end of the fraught and chaotic 1960s, it was one day nobody in America was thinking about politics. Instead, more than 94% of U.S. households with a TV set shared a sense of wonder at U.S. know-how that made the seemingly impossible happen.

When the three-man mission had blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Democratic ex-president Lyndon Johnson and current GOP vice president Spiro Agnew sat together in the VIP section (pictured at top) and watched with awe. (The equivalent today would be Donald Trump and Kamala Harris hanging out... think about it.) The happy zeitgeist was best captured by CBS anchor Walter Cronkite — when the most trusted man in America could still be a journalist — who listened to Armstrong announce the mission had reached the lunar surface and fumbled for words, taking off his glasses and rubbing his hands before blurting out, “Woo, boy.”

Tuesday will mark the 52nd anniversary of the date that an American was the first human to walk on the moon. It should be a moment not only to reflect on that historic high point, but to celebrate another scientific breakthrough that was also mostly born in the U.S.A. The record-time development of COVID-19 vaccines that have already saved thousands of lives and — under the best circumstances — could wind down the deadliest global pandemic in more than a century.

But this is not 1969.

There is, we are finding out rather painfully, a Democratic and a Republican way to do vaccines. Just travel to a place like Mountain Home, Arkansas — in a state where Trump got 62% of the vote last year — where the largest medical center is jammed with coronavirus patients, in a county where more than two-thirds of residents aren’t vaccinated and interest in the jab is low. (”It was just terrible,” a 68-year-old widow with chronic pulmonary disease told The New York Times of her COVID-19 ordeal — before adding she still won’t get vaccinated.)

*snip*

[Boomerproud]

1. I remember watching it on tv at 10pm at night and the

next morning my 20 yr old brother walking through the kitchen door coming back from Vietnam.

[Demovictory9]

2. K&r

[RAB910]

3. The right loved science when it helped kill more people

They came to hate it when it was about saving lives

In other words they loved science when new weapons were being created, but not when it was identifying threats like pollution and global warming