“They stood up for the hillbillies who worked beside them to design and build the Saturn V, the only rocket of its kind that flew the first time and never failed.”
Len Bullard recently posted a moving account of man’s humanity to man:
I grew up in a town where I was born and to which 200000 people came in a period of a few years to build rocket ships. I was one of the 15000 aborigines, a native, a redneck if you will. The first group were former enemies, German rocket scientists. My uncle who was pulled from a pile of dead bodies after the battle of the bulge wouldn’t even come to our house because our neighbors were former Nazis. Do you know what they did? They created the symphony. They created one of the best technical universities in America. They created the German language club, the public observatory where Mercury astronauts trained.
And they were the first most vocal group to demand the signs over the water fountains and the bathrooms come down. They by experience had come to understand the crime against humanity of apartheid, of the sub-human other. And they would not stand for it. When the government demanded they move to California to work on the Moon project, they told them they were citizens, this was their home, and the government could go screw themselves.
They stood up for the hillbillies who worked beside them to design and build the Saturn V, the only rocket of its kind that flew the first time and never failed.
In the bad, you may find the good. In the good, some go bad. You can’t just require people to stay in their stereotype. It’s like demanding that The Beatles once established as a pop-blues band remain that.
Mark Twain wrote in his story of the old man who died and went to heaven about the woman who had come to heaven looking for her baby who had died many years before, except the baby had elected to grow up and she not recognizing the baby she was looking for couldn’t see what the baby had become. He said they would come together by and by, but it would take a long time.
It may take a long time for the reds and the blues to find each other, but they will, by and by in a heaven of their own making, or a hell.
Choose wisely.
- Len Bullard @ Jon Taplin’s Blog: “Redneck Pride”
I believe that the town in question is Huntsville, Alabama.
~ Karl Jones
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