There are three used cars on the moon. They are all electric, have fewer than 50 miles on them, and are all in pristine condition because there is no air on the Moon. Their piano-wire tires never go flat.
You may ask, “So what?”
Well, one of those cars is parked near a plaque that says, “We came in peace for all mankind.” Three astronauts and a president of the United States signed that plaque.
Another car has a red leather Bible sitting on the control pedestal where the last driver left it for the next driver to read.
The third car is parked near a plaque which says, “May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.”
This used car lot in a suburb nearly a quarter of a million miles from where you live is an illustration of what this book is about.
Americans went to the Moon in response to a mandate from their president, who in turn was driven by Cold War tensions between the world’s two atomic superpowers. The artifacts these astronauts left behind emphasize peace, because at the time America was caught up in the terrible war raging in Vietnam.
The red leather Bible indicates that these star-voyagers were men of faith.
The technology they used—the flight guidance computers and the chips which powered them—were forerunners of the device on which you are reading these words.
The control column in each of the electric vehicles combines stopping, starting, and steering all in one place; so the car can be driven with one hand. Today, that same design enables many handicapped people to drive safely.
In order to understand where we are as a country, and where we might go from here, it would help to understand how we got here.
This book is an account spanning half a human lifetime, from the end of World War Two, when the United States of America was the mightiest nation on earth, to the fall of the Berlin Wall when the Soviet Union began to crumble. These were modern America’s formative years.